That won't be possible, as so far the only document to exhibit this behavior should never see the light of day, never mind a public forum. I did create a fresh template from the ground up; the doc in question was using an inherited template, but a doc with all the style changes I always use, so over time who knows what's stuck to it. I then attached the brand new template the problem doc -- and it didn't help. I am now going to start a fresh doc from the fresh template and see how that goes.

Side question: I attempted to get rid of normal.dot to see if that was the problem, and I've always just renamed it so as not to lose it. And yet, when I named it Bnormal, it vanished from the folder, never to be heard from again. Should I have called it normalB? And for that matter, should I dreg up a normal.dot from before the problem started and swap it in for the current normal.dot?