Thank you Paul - but we had already looked at that documentation. None of those situations applied. The good news is, we've discovered the cause. We are currently in a dual Word 2003/2010 test environment. We were launching a 2003 doc with graphics, copying the content and then pasting the content into a Word 2010 doc. This resulted in the blank red x boxes. What we should have done though, was to let Word 2010 handle the actual conversion of the graphics from 2003. So, in new testing, when we copied the 2003 doc onto a 2010 PC, launched Word 2010 and then opened the doc within Word 2010, the graphics launched correctly. So problem solved! Thanks for your time - maybe this will help others in the future.