How to stop the initial blank window on starting MS Office 2003

[Devonshire dumpling]

I have MS Office 2003 60-day free trial on my Vaio laptop MS XP SP2 that I
have just bought. When starting any MS Office 2003 program I get a blank
window at first, that has a black background and a blinking cursor, but does
not allow any input. I find that I have to close this before I can get the
actual Office program (Word, Excel,...) to start. How can I stop this
happening? Or is this some sort of intended behaviour for a free trial
product, which has the effect of discouraging people to buy it?

 

[Bob I]

That's an odd effect. Try renaming "normal.dot" and allow Word to create
a new one.

 

[Devonshire dumpling]

Thanks, Bob I. I'll try your suggestion, but since the problem occurs not
just for MS-Word but also for Excel, PPT, Outlook in the Office suite, I
don't have much hope of this being the cure.

DD

 

[Bob I]

Then about all I can offer is the suggestion to try Help, Detect and
repair, or uninstall, reinstall. Normally the trial version works just
fine for folk, right up to the point it becomes a reader at the end of
the trial period.