Macropod,

I will learn more about the replaces and maybe they will help me. As for understanding the structure of a word document, I'll point out that I've been deailing with this document from the Word UI and not with a program. Somehow something was inserted before the beginning of some paragraphs, not all of them. My attempts to remove tabs got rid of some of them but not all.

I will say two things:
1. I don't think that in the ui of any word processing software I should be able to insert "something" that I can't find and get rid of. If that is a possibility with a UI, then there is something wrong. The most I could have done was to either enter a tab or hand enter spaces. If there is some other effect that occurs that shouldn't be happening I don't know what it is. If you have any ideas I'd like to hear them.
2 Understanding the structure of a word document to the level I've been looking is not something that most people would undertake. Obviously I shouldn't need to know how a doc is structured; that's something that is obviously handled behind the scenes. I would think that with proprietary format this information would be something Microsoft would not want me to know. As I said, the UI would handle everything and any odd structuring that goes on behind the scenes should be transparent to me. I'm sure I could learn VBA and spend weeks finding out how the file is structured so I could use a program to fix it but that defeats the purpose of having a UI that does the work for you. I doubt that many people have tried this.
I have exposed the word tags and have seen nothing to give me any idea of why this is happening. So I guess I'll just have to keep hacking until I find the answer.
I have considered posting a small fragment of my doc where the mysterious spaces are but I can't see how that would be done.Would that be helpful and is it possible?

I will try your find replace suggestions. Thanks for those Maybe they will help.

Fig000