I was working on a machine running xp which would load Word 2000 right up to the moment when you can begin typing (you know, everything is up and the cursor is just going to start blinking). Then an error message pops up saying word has encountered a critical error (no details) and if I want I can send the problem to Microsoft. This computer has had a history of having virus's (viri?) so I figured the some critical file of the program got overwritten/deleted/etc. I uninstalled office 2000 and installed my new copy of office XP. I run word and the same thing happens. With XP the next time I run winword.exe it tells me "this didn't run correctly last time" and gives the safe mode option. Suprise! Running in safe mode works perfectly. So two questions: 1) Why does a totally different installation of basically a different program (XP vs 2000) have the same problem? (btw, this only has been happening with word, powerpoint, works fine) 2) And how come safe mode works even though there apparently is nothing turned off. Is it possible to make a shortcut with some switch to make it always open in safe mode? Any suggests/answers/comments would be very appreciated. Thanks, Malu

Hi, I'm completely guessing here, but is it possible that your Normal.dot template file is corrupt or contains a suspicious macro? You could try renaming it to normal.old or something to temporarily disable it. Word should then create a new one. If that's not the cause then rename it back again. Uninstalling Word may not have deleted the normal.dot template file.

You can actually delete the normal.dot file and Word will recreate a new one. It's worth a try. Actually you should search to see if you have more than one normal.dot. If so, just delete them all, close Word and then re open it.