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General discussion

MS Word closing issue

by allan jett Feb 8, 2007 8:59PM PST

Office network - dell computers - XP Pro - Office Pro 2003

One of the workstations is having problems when closing word. An error message will show a "this file is in use by another app. or user ("address of our global normal.dot is shown"). Clicking OK generates a Save as input box for the normal.dot. Canceling this and closing again generates an input box to save changes to the global template. Closing this generates an error message that the normal.dot is in use by box. Click OK and windows finally closes.

All other workstations are operating normally in word with none of these issues. I have mirrored the problem workstation file locations in the options menu with that of the other stations.

Things I have done to no avail:

1) Deleted all normal.dot from the local "C" drive
2) Opened word through Start - Run - winword /a. When opened this way Word opened and closed normally (without using our global template - it opened with a default template).
3) Renamed all other .dot extensions in the start-up files to .old to remove add-in conflicts.
4) Ran Help menu - detect & repair utility with the system disk.

None of these actions have made a difference in the way the program is closing. I know the fix is probably simple, but I am baffled. I don't see how the problem could be with our global template, since it is only occuring on this one station.

Thanks for your assistance!

Discussion is locked

2 Posts

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Re: global template

by Kees Bakker Feb 9, 2007 1:36AM PST

Must be some add-in. Tray running Word in safe mode (word /a) to see if that makes a difference. Have a look in the Office start up folder. See if the "ask to update normal.dot" setting activates a question.

In http://addbalance.com/word/savenormal.htm#PageStart click on the "Save Changes to the Global Template? Keeps Popping Up" link and page down to read more about this.

Probably you'll find that this particular user installed a particular piece of software. It's up to you to see if the company rules allow such.

Hope this helps.

Kees

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My thought. USER group?

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Feb 9, 2007 1:44AM PST

I wonder if the user's rights, group and such has an issue here. In some of those shared normal.dot IT mandated setups the IT staffer forgets to add the user to the group that has proper rights to the shared directory. The normal.dot file can be read but not updated as Word closes and you see this situation.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/224031 while not exactly spot on details this issue we had back then. A lot of IT staffers forgot the reasons for both user/group permissions and that we still need to run setup for each user. There is a more current version of said KB for your OS and Office version but I'll let you search for it.

Bob

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