It always amazes me (and drives me nuts) that every goofy behavior in Outlook is blamed on viruses.

"When I reply to a message, one time the font colors and signature will change to plum, the next time they will be olive, next green, etc. I use Word as my editor and I tried making changes to both Outlook and Word to correct but nothings worked so far.

I thought this might be caused by malicious code but I run ZoneAlarm, Norton AV 2005 and AdAware in the background and run full scans every night. My system is clean."

What's really going on:

When Word is the editor there is a setting to use a different color on each reply in a thread, so you can more easily see which comment you made when. When composing a message, go to Tools, Options, General tab, Email options button, Stationery tab - remove the check from the option to use a different color on each reply.