If I'm desperate I'll try the above suggestion, but I still don't want
to use either table styles or the Normal paragraph style at all so I'll
experiment with other approaches first. I'm pretty sure documents based
on my old Office 97 templates have well-behaved paragraph styles in
tables, so perhaps I can find a combination of Compatibility options
that doesn't take me quite so far back into the dark ages.

The only other thing that comes to mind would be to construct the tables
in code first, as HTML (or XML, if this is Word 2003), then
insert/drop/convert them into the document. That should at least avoid
all the "auto" mechanisms of working in the UI.

Note: I'd leave the PasteOptions buttons active in the UI. You can always
turn individual ones off by pressing ESC. And you CAN access them via the
keyboard: Shift+Alt+F10

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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