Thanks guys for your guidance. The boxes did turn out to be frames. And I did find the technique for removing the frame. But as you said, no matter how good the scan program is, everything turns out to be a big mess.

This document is almost 700 pages long (with all of its supplemental parts), and has hundreds of graphics. And while Readiris actually did a great job of scanning and OCR'ing, it is way too big and daunting of a chore to mess with.

I did manage to find the bulk of the original Word document that I had saved to CD many years ago, but it missing many pages that I wrote and illustrated at a later date.

So, since I have a printer / scanner / faxer /etc. that has a sheet feeder that holds about 100 pages on it, and it doesn't care if I scan to a file or scan to another pile of paper, and since I only need one copy right now, I'm just going to make one copy of this document at a time for now.

Thank you so much for sharing your expertise!