I hate to call it "poorly written," since it was written by a fellow MVP
whom I greatly respect, but one add-in I had installed used to change one of
my Options settings at startup. I nearly went crazy trying to get that
setting to "stick." I deleted the Word Data key in the Registry, recorded an
AutoExec macro to set it correctly, etc., before finding that deleting the
add-in solved the problem. The issue here is that add-in developers
sometimes write code to have the add-in change one Options setting without
taking care to preserve all your other existing settings. The result is that
you end up with your settings the same as those in effect on the developer's
machine. At least I assume that's what's happening.
You can get an idea of at least some of the add-ins that are loaded with
Word by looking at the list in Tools | Templates and Add-ins. Whenever you
suspect that an add-in may be causing a given problem, you can test by
temporarily removing it. Note that unloading it (by unchecking it in the
dialog) will not help because add-ins in Word's (or the Office) Startup
folder will load again the next time you start. You have to temporarily move
a given file out of the Startup folder (put it somewhere you can find it
easily so you can move it back if it's not the culprit).
Some notorious troublemakers (not necessarily with regard to Options but
just in general) are the Office Plug-in in Norton AntiVirus and the
Microsoft Works Suite Add-in for Word (the former should be disabled and the
latter uninstalled). Both are COM add-ins, so they won't show up in the
Tools | Templates and Add-ins dialog in Word. For instructions on
troubleshooting add-ins, see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CheckIfAddinsInstalled.htm
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
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