This is driving me insane.

I'll work on a document all day long and customize my tables using a
custom formatted Table Style. Things go better some days than others,
but ultimately, I'll save the document or email it to someone and when
I open it again or it's sent back to me, all my table formatting
disappears!

So I have to go through the entire document and reapply the formatting
to each table. Not difficult in some documents but I'm currently
combining 32 different documents into one and it will take me forever
to keep doing this over and over again.

Also frustrating is that sometimes I've applied additional shading
after the table style is set. This formatting will go away when I
reapply the style.

One more weird behavior with tables (I don't know if it's related or
not). Often, out of nowhere, all the text in my tables will change to
something weird. I found a way to fix this...If I go to "Reveal
Formatting." I see the table style has somehow changed to a paragraph
style (e.g., Section Heading). To fix it, I select everything that
already has that style and assign a new style, then delete the
original. By doing this, the table formatting goes back to normal.

I am using Word 2003 but had the same problem in the previous version.
I was hoping when I upgraded it would take care of it. Please help!
Jodi