Thanks both . Don't use flash drives so can rule that one out. Tried to toggle on/off but doesn't seem to fix this problem :-( it's becoming a pain in the neck as quite a few users are experiencing this now. Interestingly the users experiencing this seem to be using word 2010. These documents go through quite a few people though so could have been edited in an earlier version of word before being emailed. It seems the doc opens fine but as soon as they do anything I.e. Open the embeded excel headers and footers go to gibberish.