I'm the OP on this recent thread and to recap: MacBook Pro (2009) recently upgraded from OS 10.5.8 Snow Leopard to 10.8.5 Mountain Lion, and from Office 2008 to 2011. I primarily use Word to create and edit long documents of about 150,000 words. The basic problem reported earlier appears to be caused by the interaction of three changes, one in the OS and two in Word.

I understand this isn't a Mac forum, but suffice it to say that Mountain Lion changes the way the scroll function works. The single arrows at the bottom of the scroll bar that allowed single line forward and backward movement within a body of text are gone. Much has been written about users not being given the option of keeping them, and I won't address that here because the single arrows apparently won't be coming back.

Another Word change is that the double arrows at the bottom of the scroll bar that used to be "Next Page/Previous Page" commands are now "browse arrows." The little circle in the center allows you to select different functions for the arrows to "Browse by Table, Graphic, Heading, Edits, Find, Go To, Page, Section, Comment, Footnote, Endnote, and Field." I initially chose "Browse by Page," which duplicates the double arrow function I'm used to from Word 2008 and is helpful when navigating through long documents. I also found an option in "Apple>System Preferences>General" that allowed me to select "Click in the scroll bar to: Jump to the next page," and perform the same function.

The third factor is that Word 2011 has changed the way the "Edit>Find" command appears and works. Much has also been written about some of these new features being less user-friendly, especially because the "Edit>Find" dialogue box in Word 2008 is no longer the default. You have to use "Edit>Find>Advanced Find and replace" if you want the dialogue box to appear.

In the short time I've used Word 2011, I've decided to alter the keyboard shortcut so that Cmd + F selects that advanced function and displays the dialogue box. It's what I'm used to and I like the way it allows me to efficiently find and make changes within long documents. You can do that with View>Toolbars>Customize Toolbars and Menus, click Keyboard and select Edit>EditFindDialog and enter the keystroke combination you want to assign that shortcut to the command. So far so good.

The problem reported in my original post was that once I used the "Find>Advanced find and replace" function the first time after launching Word, any use of the double browse arrows produced a window that said, "Word has reached the end of the document. Do you want to continue searching at the beginning?" with "No" and "Yes" buttons. No matter which button I clicked, any subsequent click on the browse double arrows brought the same window back up and prevented navigating in the document with them. The only way to get out of that cycle was to quit Word and start again.

Since the original posting, however, something has happened to eliminate this problem. I have no idea what fixed it. Now when I first launch Word, the double browse arrows work as Previous Page/Next Page commands. But after the first time I use the "Find>Advanced find and replace" function to display the dialogue box, the browse arrows change to "Previous Find/GoTo" and "Next Find/GoTo" commands. And unlike before, if I click on the small circle between the two double browse arrows and select "Browse by Page," the double browse arrows return to that function and I can use them without locking up.

The conclusion I've come to is that while the original hang-up loop problem might have been a malfunction, it also could have resulted from the new way in which these arrows are designed to work. I never noticed that my previous "Browse by Page" choice for the double arrows had been changed by Word to "Browse by Find/GoTo" automatically. Once that happens and I'm finished with the "Find>Advanced find and replace" function, I can either change the function of the arrows back to "Browse by Page" or click in the scroll bar above or below the present-page indicator (for want of a better term since I'm not sure what it's called) to move one page at a time, or click and drag on the indicator to move through multiple pages quickly.

I hope this information helps anyone working with multiple pages of text to avoid the frustration I've had to deal with trying to understand what's going on with scrolling, browsing, and the find/find and replace functions of Word 2011 running on a Mountain Lion OS.

Tosh