Hello,

I'm back taking a look at this again. I'm wondering what you mean by this.

Of course all the data originally comes from an Access database, but there are no links between the Word document and the database, only between the document and the RTF file. Is there something I should look for in the document?

I noticed that even though the Word doc goes through this 2 step confirmation process, it remains linked to the original rtf file. Also, each time it tries to link to the 2nd file, the file has a different name. Bottom line is that it doesn't seem to do any damage and the merge operation still works. I'm just really curious as to why this is happening

No luck trying to create a new document. The problem seems to persist.