Dear Linda, Firstly, many thanks in advance for any help you may be able to offer me - I am tearing my hair out at the moment! I have thoroughly read the Word Troubleshooting tutorial on your personal tutor website (it was very clear and user-friendly; thank you), but here's the thing .... Word (I have Word 2003) has been slowing down on my computer for some time. Yesterday morning it started refusing to save changes to documents; in fact closing any document brought up the 'Microsoft Word has encountered a problem and needs to close' message. It just crashed on exiting every time, (and 'Word is not responding' came up when it tried to rescue save my work). As of this morning this happens when trying to even open Word. I followed your tutorial (and did a full virus scan with Avast and a defrag, possibly irrelevantly), and while Word will open fine if I run 'winword.exe /a' as suggested, no new normal.dot template comes into existence! I deleted the normal.dot (I had two) items I found when I searched for them and now no new one gets made when I launch Word. What's that all about? I have Googled and so on all day and night and found no solution. There were no Add-Ins. I tried deleting the Data folder in the registry key - No effect. I did Detect and Repair - No effect. I will only uninstall and reinstall if absolutely necessary and if I think it will actually work. Since Word is launching fine from 'winword.exe /a' will uninstalling and reinstalling even work? I have a hell of a lot of work on my computer (though not more than it's capable of handling), and Excel etc. are fine so I'm afraid to wipe Office out. Do you know what might be happening here and if uninstalling is the way to go? Warm regards, Katherine Duke ************************************************************* You are receiving this mail because you subscribed to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or MicrosoftOffice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To send mail to the group, simply address it to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To Unsubscribe from this group, visit the group's homepage and use the dropdown menu at the top. This will allow you to unsubscribe your email address or change your email settings to digest or vacation (no mail). //www.freelists.org/webpage/mso To be able to share files with the group, you must join our Yahoo sister group. This group will not allow for posting of emails, but will allow you to join and share problem files, templates, etc.: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MicrosoftOffice . This group is for FILE SHARING ONLY. If you are using Outlook and you see a lot of unnecessary code in your email messages, read these instructions that explain why and how to fix it: http://personal-computer-tutor.com/abc3/v28/greg28.htm *************************************************************