Help - Word 2003 opening trouble

[CharBhasha]

As I double click on a document file (.doc file),
Word opens with an error msg like this -
_______________________________________________
Microsoft Office Word
"The command cannot be performed because a dialog box is open.
Click OK, and then close open dialog boxes to continue."
_______________________________________________

But I can open the Word, then open the doc file from within the
Word without any problem. I have unloaded the whole Office
and re-loaded it back. But I still have the same problem.

How do I fix this problem? Any help will be highly appreciated.

CB

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If you have Norton AntiVirus installed, disable its Office Plug-in. If
that's not the problem, it's probably due to another add-in.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[CharBhasha]

Suzanne,
Thank you so much. It is working now.
CB

 

[Guest]

Wonder what happened to Norton's. It used to be such a good product. Now the
universal advice (and it seems to work) is 'disable Norton's.

 

[Jay Freedman]

The advice is to disable the Norton Office Plug-in, not the antivirus
scanner. As far as we can tell, the Office Plug-in doesn't provide any
protection that isn't given by the regular "real-time protection"
(scanning files as they're opened), but it does sometimes cause these
problems.

My opinion (and only that): Symantec spent -- and continues to spend
-- much more care, time, and money on the actual antivirus
functionality than on the peripheral bits such as the Office add-in.
Probably that's as it should be. The tests and reviews in the major
magazines always rate Norton as one of the two or three best antivirus
packages overall. Still, it would be nice if this minor annoyance was
fixed.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for that Jay. I note in the virus and spyware newsgroups an almost
universal hatred of Norton AV (and many stories of disaster), and therefore
I have not dared to invoke mine that came with my new home XP machine.

 

[Jay Freedman]

I think the "many stories of disaster" with Norton AV have much in
common with the many complaints about problems with Word or with HP
printer drivers -- each one has such a huge market share that the
absolute number of problems is large, but the number as a percentage
of that software's users is relatively small.

You almost never see anyone post in the newsgroups about how
wonderfully problem-free their software has been.

FWIW, I've used Norton Corporate Edition AV for many years with no
problems. (But it doesn't have an Office Plug-in, for which I'm
grateful.) I wish I could say the same of ZoneAlarm Pro -- it's a fine
firewall and it has blocked every attempt to get access to my
computers, but it's also caused several programs and web sites to
become nearly unusable until I hand-tweaked its settings. Its
"automatic program recognition database" seems to have all of three or
four entries.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I wish you would tell me the secret settings needed to tame ZAP, as it
drives me crazy. But I agree about NAV. I have found it blessedly
trouble-free, while my husband is constantly fighting with McAfee. Moreover,
I have had a computer virus (worm) exactly once in my entire computing
career: I was lucky enough to contract Blaster before Symantec pushed the
new definitions for it. Luckily I was able to eradicate it without too much
trouble and with no loss of data.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Working from memory, since I'm not at home now:

For web sites, it's usually ZAP's default settings for blocking cookies that
cause the problem. I have to go to the page under Privacy Protection that
lists web sites, and specifically allow cookies for that site. I'm not about
to allow tracking cookies to be saved for every sleazy advertiser on the
web, so the defaults will stay as they are, and I'll deal with the others as
they occur.

For programs, there's a page under Program Control that lets you specify
which ones are allowed to contact the Internet and/or the local (trusted)
zone. I find that checking the "Remember this" box and the Allow button in
the popup for a new or changed program sometimes doesn't save the setting to
this page, so the popups keep recurring until I go in and force it. The
"Components" page that lists all the individual DLLs is worthless -- there
are a gazillion of them, mostly unidentifiable.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Thanks for the tips. It seems that every time I get ZAP updates the
annoyances start anew. I'll start composing a message in OE, and ZAP will
warn me that OE is trying to connect with the Internet (or some other such
idiocy). It's very protective of any kind of interaction between programs,
too.

One of the things I have found most annoying is that it fails to distinguish
between "ads" and buttons such as those that say "Get Adobe Reader." I have
one of those on my page at
http://home.earthlink.net/~fairhoperotary/documents.htm but had to add a
text link for users who (like me) have ZAP set to suppress banner ads and
consequently can't see the button. I also had to change the size of the book
covers at http://home.earthlink.net/~wordsintotype/Books.htm because the
default thumbnail size was evidently just the size that ZAP sees as an "ad."

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.