Multimple 2007 WinWord processes

Has anybody else run into looking in the running processes and seeing multiple instances of WinWord? I thought it was strange when I opened Word to find it was the 3rd one open! And in reality it was the only visible one open. Which meant that 2 others were open somewhere. I opened Task Manager and saw not just 1 or 2 but 6 winword instances running long after they were supposed to be closed!!