Currently, the reason you can't have a custom menu appear in the zero-doc state is because ActiveX is bound to the currently open document, which of course is non-existent in a zero-doc state. It stands to reason then, that we might be able to provide our own custom menu in a zero-doc state if the ActiveX api was changed to allow binding to the application object, which does exist at startup. This way we could program for temporary menus at startup or design our own startup dialog.