Most Office 2003 applications worked well except for word.

Word would just silently refuse to start… no error messages.

Sometimes the word window would appear very briefly, then disappear.

And looking at the processes in task manager, I can see that Microsoft Word (winword.exe) is not running.

OK, it looks like word starts, encounters a severe error, then exits.

Depending on how you started word (double click on an existing .doc document, start word directly, use word to open text documents), then sometimes I’d get an error about normat.dot.

Other times, Word would only start in safe mode.

I try a few ways around this, and eventually find the solution: rename (or delete) normal.dot

To find it: start -> search -> for files or folders -> all files and folders -> enter normal.dot in the file name box -> click search