Word97 crashes

[John Lilly <jlilly -at- IDCOMM -dot- COM>]

Has anyone seen or heard of the following bug? If so, do you know a
cause or solution? I saw a somewhat similar query in the archives, from
August, but I did not see any responses.

I recently had a 20 section, 140 page, 1.5 Mb Word97 file. I noticed a
couple of footers had lost some characters, and when I attempted to
correct them, Word would hang (cursor would disappear when over the Word
window, had to force quit).

When I did a "show all," I saw a character in the two troublesome
footers (in different sections of the file) that I can only describe as
a lowercase "y" with an umlaut over it. It was in hidden text, thus
normally not visible. I definitely did not put it there.

I could delete the character, but if I then tried to type anywhere near
it to correct the footer, Word would stop responding. In fact, I had the
NT Task Manager up alongside my document and within seconds of doing
anything near the bad character, Word would change to "not responding."
I had no macros in the document or template and no memory problems (I
was working on a souped up NT machine). I can still reproduce the crash
at will.

Facing a tight deadline and with no idea how to correct the problem in
Word97, I copied the offending chapters into Word 6.0/95 format, cleaned
them up in Word 7.0 (which did not hang), re-imported the clean chapters
into the original, and deleted the buggy chapters. After this, Word97
again added the character to another footer, but since that footer was
otherwise correct, I was able to finish the project.

I saw one mention at the Microsoft site of a footer bug that related to
field codes, but my problem was occurring in plain text.

Any comments, ideas? If you want to talk offline, I'll summarize for
others. If you want a screen shot of the buggy character, I'll send one.
Thanks in advance.

-John Lilly
K2 Communications


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