Ok, thanks Stefan. The text box solution does work - but if I convert
the text box to a frame the problem re-appears. So it really has to do
with some fundamental magic about tables that allows them to behave as
I want inside of a text box but not inside a frame. Ug.

In any case, because of the problem of the frames overlapping my
footnotes, I've decided to simply to have my boxes inline and make the
table always as wide as the box; it ain't that pretty but it's the best
solution I've found.

It looks like someone else ran into this a while ago:
http://groups.google.com/group/micro...72fde9495d6423

Thanks for the description of the frame placement options. Too bad
Word there isn't documentation that comes with Word 2003 that explains
this stuff, or am I not looking in the right place?

thanks,
karl