For no apparent reason last week, all the users in one department started to experience the same problem in Word 2000. Whenever they open an existing document, the cursor starts to flash between an hourglass and the normal cursor. This continues until Word is closed. If a new document is created the problem doesn't occur. As soon as an old document is opened though, the cursor starts to flash, even if you switch back to the newly created document. It's not just annoying to look at, it is actually slowing the users down. Whenever the cursor flashes an hourglass the users are unable to click any menus or interact with anything on screen. Initially I thought it might be network traffic, but the the flashing is too regular. It's a constant flashing between the two, lasting about a second on each one. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! We've got about 250 other users who don't get this problem despite being connected to the same network / subnet etc. thanks

LOCATE THE NORMAL.DOT FILE it is a hidden file so you may have to change your sytem so that it will let you view hidden files. find this normal.dot and delete it. then re-boot your sys and open up word. this should fix your problem. good luck

IF youre firm has any templates regarding word. Just be sure that the users use the same normal.dot. If users that expirence problems use one normal.dot and other that is not expiriencing the problem, uses another normal.dot. Then problem is solved. Anyway....good luck Bjørn Norway

3/23/03 Well, it appears I now have this Flashing Hourglass disease and it is making Microsoft Word 2002 in XP completely aggravating to use. Whenever I open previous documents or start a new document within every 3-4 seconds a hourglass pops up interrupting everything in Word. It is causing me to lose characters while Word is off busy doing something in the background. I came across one suggestion to locate the C:\Documents and Settings\Jose\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\Normal.Dot file and delete it and then re-boot the system and open up Word again, well I did this and there was no difference, the Flashing Hourglass disease is still there. I go into the Ctrl Pan – Administrative Tools – Performance Monitor and it shows 20% CPU activity happening at periodic intervals, so something is definitely going on in the background. And the Event Viewer shows no application errors or warnings. This is getting extremely annoying and causing numerous errors on top of that. If anyone has seen and dealt with such a problem, any help you can email along would be certainly well appreciated tremendously. Thank you in advance, John