MS Word - Keeps requesting user to save Normal template

Question

We have Small Business Server 2008 setup on a couple of our clients networks and we have the following issue.

Whenever they logon, Microsoft word automatically opens and requests them to save their changes to the template 'Normal'. It constantly happens, we have a mixture of Win 2000 and XP machines and it seems to happen more often on XP than 2000.

Any idea why this might be happening and how we can resolve it, it's just frustrating for the end users.

PS: This is happening on Office 2000 and Office 2003.

Answer 1

There isn't a valid normal template in %appdata%\Microsoft\Templates\normal.doc (add an X to the end of that extension for Office 2007 or 2010).

I've seen this happen if the directory Templates somehow gets replaced with a file name Templates. Or if the user doesn't have rights to read the template that's there, or doesn't have rights to save an updated template there.

Answer 2

I saw this happen when I was working in application deployment. The install we had created for our images did not contain this default document. When we pushed out the image the default user account did not have this default document. So every user that logged into the machine had their profile created without this document and it woudl always complain. We had to go back and begin including this file in what we pushed out to machines with their default image.