Suzanne,
I was able to replace Normal.dot. I am very confused, though, about why I
was able to work so long on this doc with "Keep track of formatting" on and
it only recently became unruly. Aside of this, what is "default paragraph
font para char"?

More important, can I still use this file? Should I create a new file with
some kind of new formatting for this document?

thanks
Sandra

"Sandra Salstrom" wrote:

You did it! It worked. Wow! Why?

I had figured it was a history of crashing/recovering without deleting temp
files, and having a changed normal.dot. So, when I saw your advice (and it
worked!), I had just deleted all temp files I could get my hands on, and I
was about to replace normal.dot with a pristine version (I must have clicked
"yes" sometime or other to a dialog box asking me if I want to change the
template). However, I'm not having any luck overwriting that normal.dot with
another one. Any advice on that?

Thanks, Susan!

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

Do you have "Keep track of formatting" checked on the Edit tab of Tools |
Options? If so, what happens if you clear the check box?

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Sandra Salstrom" Sandra wrote in
message ...
The Problem: all of the styles have morphed into a style called "default
paragraph font para char"

Have a major document (MS Word 2003, Professional version / OS is Win XP)
that will need editing, etc for the rest of its long life. Created styles
for
it that worked like a charm. Finished/published it 2 weeks ago. Looked at
it
today and every style has morphed into a strange style called "default
paragraph font para char" that I've never seen before. However, the doc
still
looks exactly the same as before. Several of my backups/revisions have the
same problem. None of my other documents have this problem.

I've never seen such a thing. Microsoft Knowledge Base has no clues for me
(that I can find). What happened? What can I do?