Ok, I think I have discovered the source of the problem--now it is just a matter of how to fix it.

Looking at my Microsoft Word horizontal scrollbar I notice there is is a square's worth of "extra space" there, which is larger than the actual page.

When I am working on a document the scollbar is normally to the far right, but ocasionally it jumps to the far left to fill that "empty square" and when it does this, the first letters of my paragraphs get pushed off of the left side into nowhere.

is there some way I can set the horizontal width of the page so that the width of the horizontal scrollbar is flush with the page itself?

It seems like if there was some way I could do this, it would stop the problem.