I'm having a problem with my normal.dot becoming enormous after I run a
macro.  This macro has a lot going on, but nothing that obviously would
affect my normal.dot file.  It basically goes through a folder, opens a bunch
of files one at a time (about 70 or 80 files in all), looks for bookmarks
with certain things in their names, and copies and pastes the text in those
bookmarks into another document.

I have a couple suspicions of what might be going on, but not sure how to
prevent or fix these problems.

First, each one of these files that the macro is opening has their own
attached dot file with some special menus in them.  (Those are the menus that
were used to set these bookmarks to begin with.)  These dot files are NOT
global templates, but rather are just attached to those documents.  I have a
suspicion that perhaps somehow opening a file with an attached template might
somehow cause your normal.dot template to be modified also.  Any insight?

Alternatively, I wonder if there is something to do with style definitions.  
All of these files that I am opening were received from different parties,
and a lot of them have their own special style definitions.  I know I have
had major headaches before with people's styles somehow migrating into my
computer.  Could it be that every new style in each of these documents I am
opening gets added to my normal.dot?

My normal.dot files starts out at 488k, and ends up at about 4 MB after I
run this macro a couple times.  At that point, my computer (a rather powerful
new type of computer) becomes completely bogged down, and extremely slow.  I
can close Word and restart my computer, but the slowness remains until I
replace my normal.dot file with an archived copy.

Thanks for any help.