From long experience, I avoid continuous section breaks (CSB) like the plague, but occasionally I have to deal with them in business proposals, when a writer has inserted thmn for what should be a borderless table. I had this experience yesterday, with the following difficulty.

Two documents, each from our template, which has a next-page section break (NPSB) after the title page and another after the front matter, before normal page numbering begins. One doc had two CSBs on one page; the other, as far as I could tell (even checking the full document in draft view), a surprising three. In both cases, I was unable to delete the CSBs without having the NPSB preceding them changed into a CSB. (In one case, removal also eded up converting every text paragraph to a comma followed by a space, but the document may have had some unrelated corruption.)

I tried separating the CSBs from the NPSB above with extra paragraphs, an addtional NPSB, and so forth, but the conversion happened each time.

In both cases, my only solution was to delete all section breaks and transfer everything after front matter (minus a final emplty paragraph), into a fresh document based on the same template with its title page and front matter properly segregated.

My questions are why the conversion of the NPSB occurs, and whether there is a method of deleting the CSBs without encountering this difficulty.

Thank you.