Hi Suzanne:

You initially helped me with the first set of corruption, and yes, you'll
see in the history that I tried almost every method in the article (using two
completely different computers with differnet memory and other applications).
I did replace my normal.dot - just forgot, its been a couple of weeks.

Thanks for replying so quickly.

"Frustrated" wrote:

Hi -

I've been experiencing serious problems with a file I was asked to format.
As near as I can tell the problems are with Word 2003 and section breaks. I'm
including a history here in hopes you can help me avoid these problems in the
future as I'm not 100% sure what is causing the issues but the file keeps
corrupting over and over again.

My final conclusion is that these problems are caused by a bug in Word 2003.
My solution is to recreate the file in Word 2000.

--I've worked with fresh copy on two different laptops so I know the problem
is not related to a specific laptop.
--I also do regular Office updates, but according to company policy we can
not upgrade our XP to SP2 (that could also be causing the issue).
--I've never had issues like this in Word 2000

History of the original problems (starting in mid-November and taking about
20 hours to do all of what is below - which is 14 hours over the time
allotted).

1. Received file on my work laptop in Word 2003, and it corrupted in Word
2000. Worked with Rich to get a copy in Word 97.
2. Made edits to that copy. When I started to add the final touches to the
formatting, I was unable to do what I should be able to do. Did some research
on the net to find out what to do and received notice that the problem was
probably file corruption.
3. Started with a fresh copy and had the same problems despite leaving out
what appeared to be trouble areas (embedded docs and sections).
4. Moved to my personal laptop (which has Word 2003) and started over with
a clean copy in 2003. Again reached the final stages of formatting and the
file corrupted.
5. Recreated the file from scratch by copying the text into Notepad than
moving it back into Word 2003. Then typed in missing text (I don't know why
it was missing - perhaps it was the corrupted text), added graphics and
formatted.
6. File corrupted yet again when I added two sections.
7. Removed the sections and it appeared fine, but then Marty and Rich had
problems with it when I sent it out.
8. Thought we had fixed these problems. Started on Marty's changes and got
about 20 pages into the manual (yesterday, December 2).
9. Opened the file to work on it, and it was corrupted again.