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Thanks to all of you who expressed sypathy for my plight. It appears
that numerous people have had crash-inducing characters (a hidden text
"y" in my case) appear in Word97 footers.
One writer indicated that he solved his problem by applying the SR-1
patch provided by Microsoft. For others this did not work.
I finally received a reply from Microsoft's email support. While not
admitting that this was truly a bug (surprise!), they did suggest saving
tempermental Word97 documents as RTF and then creating a new Word file
from the RTF. This worked for my document. Remember, however, that some
formatting can be lost in this process. They did not mention using the
SR-1 patch.
