RE: HELP! A monumental pickle

["Fred Ridder" <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Many times the kind of behavior you describe is caused by some
type of corruption in the invisible parts of Word documents. Two
of the most common trouble-makers are section breaks (lots of
page formatting information gets embedded in those double
dotted lines) and particularly the final paragraph symbol in the
document (which is where Word embeds all the document-wide
formatting, including the whole stylesheet). Many unstable Word
documents have been "fixed" (or at least made workable) by
somethinhg as simple as copying everything *except* the *last*
paragraph mark into a new document. But if the document has
multiple sections, it may be necessary to do the copy and paste
on a section-by-section basis, always being careful to *not* copy
and paste the old section break symbol (the double dotted lines).

Another potential problem area is too many marked (or tracked)
revisions. Word's revision tracking has an enormous overhead,
and if Word has to keep trak of a lot of revisions by a lot of
different authors it can definitely affect the document's stability.
Try doing a global accept revisions on a copy of the file.

My opinions only; I don't speak for Intel.
Fred Ridder
Intel
Parsippany, NJ