Suppressing the Control Toolbox Toolbar

Have you ever used Word to open a document and had the Control Toolbox appear right away? How about running a macro and having the Control Toolbox appear? Various people have reported this behavior in Word, and it can be very frustrating.

One possible cause for the Control Toolbox popping up is that one or more components in the macros attached to the document (or a template used by the document) have open designers associated with them. A designer is nothing but a visual design window used within the VBE to design new forms, classes, or other objects used in a VBA project. It is possible for designers to be open and associated with a project, but not be visible. When this happens, the Control Toolbox is displayed, even though the designer window is not.

To solve this situation, you should make sure that all designers are closed and then save the document or template. You can close all the designers by running the following macro:

Sub CloseDesignWindows()
    Dim K As Long
    With ActiveDocument.VBProject
        For K = 1 To .VBComponents.Count
            With .VBComponents(K)
                If .HasOpenDesigner Then .DesignerWindow.Close
            End With
        Next
    End With
End Sub

Just run the macro right before you save the document or template.