We have a group that uses Track Changes Comments extensively. Since updating to Word 2007 docx, periodically all comments will disappear, leaving only the bubble. Usually the person opening the file will get an error message stating that the document cannot be opened because there are problems with the content. Then if they continue they are asked if they want to recover it. If they continue further, they are told that repairs were needed and a list appears including "Comments1, Drawn Objects1, etc." All comments are gone when the eventual file is opened. This is a file saved on a hard drive or server. The user is not trying to open them from an e-mail.

This is not a new problem. I researched it early last year and found incidents noted on the web but not in the MS forums. I resolved it by recommending to this group to always save down to .doc, which does not seem to have the problem. The problem has cropped up again in a docx file and I want to find out if there is any news/information about this difficulty. We would prefer to use docx files but not if they have this problem. Please advise. Thank you.

Hi techwriterrc12,

Is your Office 2007 installation fully updated and have you tried repairing it (via Word Options|Resources|Diagnose)?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Everyone has the same software/updates. Repair has been tried. This is software for a large company and is continuously updated. It is unlikely to be a single person's software since the problem crops up in other groups as well, primarily where comments are heavily used. The majority of people do not use comments. I have contacted the company's IT people (last year) and there was no obvious answer from them and since it seems to be an intermittent problem, no real way for them to address it. When I researched it last year, there was a fair amount of chatter on it on the web, all from corporate/academic users. Whether this is simply because they use comments more than other users or because they use a corporate/server-based environment, I don't know. There was some suspicion at one time that the problem was only in documents that were e-mailed and worked on within the e-mail so that issue was addressed. But that is not true for the documents I am referring to.

Thanks...

Intermittent problems are often the hardest to solve. In this case, the "error message stating that the document cannot be opened because there are problems with the content" evidences some document corruption. Files saved to removable media (especially USB sticks) are more susceptible to this, due to users not ejecting the media properly.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I'm going to give up on this one...I think we've proven the problem is in docx files and the only sure way to avoid it is to save all these files to doc.