addled

Thank you for your advice Hightower and Dr Perceptron. You are quite right. Unfortunately I've lost my customizations (quite extensive as I've been writing a book). Here is the odd part. If you click on the old (corrupted??) Normal.dot file, Word opens just fine!!! Can anyone explain?

Yesterday, when I started Word by clicking on the "W" icon, I got the following dialogue boxes: Message 1: "Microsoft Office Word has encountered a problem and needs to close. The information you are working on might be lost..... Send error report?....." Message 2: About failing to start last time and do you want to open Word in safe mode. Word opens in Safe mode but if you anwer 'No' it goes into an endless loop of these two messages. WHAT I DID I uninstalled then reinstalled Word. But I still have the problem. Word WILL start okay, however, if I click on a Word file. Any help would be appreciated