can't open word documents

all of a sudden my word documents open up with a grey
screen and microsoft word blinking at the top of the
screen,also just above the task bar it says-running virus
scan.when this happens nothing will get rid of the screen
without rebooting.Any suggestions would be greatly
appreciated

thanks bob

anonymous
Sat Jul 31 12:56:30 CDT 2004


>-----Original Message-----
> all of a sudden my word documents open up with a grey
>screen and microsoft word blinking at the top of the
>screen,also just above the task bar it says-running
virus
>scan.when this happens nothing will get rid of the
screen
>without rebooting.Any suggestions would be greatly
>appreciated
>
>thanks bob
>.
>problem solved-but i dont know why or how?

In trying different things a message appeared and said
something like- there was something wrong with the
file "normal.dot" not knowing what the heck that was i
impetuously deleted the file.But after
googleling "normal.dot" a microsoft knowledge base
article popped up and it said that microsoft strongly
recommends that you not delete this file well i already
did so what do i do now? Well i was just about to go back
to google when it hit me to go look in my trashcan.I
reinstated the file and another message popped up saying
that their were two "normal.dot files one dated in july
and another back in febuary and so which one did i want?
I chose the one from febuary and the problem resolved
itself.But now i dont know how to prevent this from
happening again? If anyone knows what may have happened
please respond-thanks bob

Helmut
Sat Jul 31 13:34:39 CDT 2004

Hi Bob,
as this is a VBA group, concerned with programming Word,
sourcecode to be interpreted by word can be stored in any dot
or doc, though mostly it might be found in normal.dot,
whether you put it there, unvoluntarily, or some program did it.
A viruschecker may have found it and got confused. Deleting or
overwriting normal.dot could be a daily routine. I did it or had
it done programmatically 100,000 times without any error, given
the definition, that an error is the difference between reality
and expectation. As long as you know what you are doing, know that
there is nothing in normal.dot you must keep, deleting it is
best practice in many cases. If you start Word and there is no
normal.dot, Word will create a new, clean, virusfree one,
"like a virgin".
---
Greetings from Bavaria, Germany
Helmut Weber
"red.sys" & chr(64) & "t-online.de"
Word XP, Win 98