When I open Word docs, sometimes they open as read only, and sometimes they open as normal files. I have never used the RO feature for any Word doc, and none of my Word docs have the RO property, yet some files open as RO. More curiously, I can close an RO file and when I open it again, the file opens as a non-RO file. The RO feature just comes and goes, and it seems totally arbitrary. Do I need an exorcist? I have a new Dell Inspiron 1525, with Vista Home Premium.

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Have you change anything in the options for your MS Word in the general tab? Or as anything been added to MS Office 2003 lately?

Under Tools then Options, then Security did you check Read Only?

Are you opening the documents on your local computer? Are they your private documents or could they be opened by someone else at the same time? Are you sure you are not opening the same document twice yourself?

I have never used the RO feature for any Word file. In fact, I did not even know what it was until this started happening. I have not made any changes to the General Word tab, nor have I added any updates to the program.

Thank you.

This is a very common problem with Office 2003 and Word 2003.
Be sure you have all the downloads for Service Pack 1, 2, and 3, with all the other update downloads.
Then to to the Microsoft Knowledge Base where are are a number of postings about the causes, and how to fix this pretty common problem.

Updates may work but you might have remove the normal.dot and let Word re-create one. Read Only can appear on certain files that where left open and never closed. Go into your My Documents folder without have word open and delete all the *.tmp files in there. Then try to open those files again.

I will try it. Thanks.