I switched on my Windows 7 PC this morning to discover that I could not open any file in Word 2003 or indeed open a new mail message in Outlook 2003 (which uses Word as its editor). I ran a repair installation of Office 2003 in case the problem was with that and also deleted my normal.dot file, however neither of those fixed the problem.
My problem was that I selected the file I wanted to open and clicked 'Open' in the file dailog box. Word announced it was 'running virus scan', however the scan failed to complete and Word would freeze at this point. If I forced word to shut down and tried running it again, it would usually fail to run at all until I rebooted the computer.
After a great deal of web searching (including on this forum) I determined that the Microsoft Office Automatic Scan might be the problem (a post mentions something similar happening a few years ago). I disabled the automatic scan and Word now opens files without problem. Until today the Automatic Scan worked fine so I can only assume that this problem was introduced in an update downloaded sometime yesterday (Friday 6th July). Can this be fixed?
