Sorry Paul, to answer your question, whether I use my desktop copies of BBG or the upoaded files to you they appear and behave the same.

Hello Paul,

I have now carried out a number of tests and found the following.
Whilst text always appears in blue when the colour is set to B:255 it prints in black. Select colour B:254 or less and, again text appears in blue but it also prints in blue. Put text back to B:255 and whilst it still appears in blue it actually prints in black.
Weird or What?
Either way, now I know how to cure it (even if I don't know what causes it) I am very much happier and able to carry on working.
I sincerely Thank You for staying with me and guiding me in the right direction. I owe you Buddy.

Gary

The valid RGB value range for all colours is 0 to 255. If that's not working on your system, there's a fault somewhere. I'm glad you have a workaround, but you probably don't want to spend time on every document you get with blue text changing the colours so as to work around that problem. A reinstall of Word might fix it, but I'm not particularly hopeful - given that it affected the printout from WordPad on your system as well, it may be a Windows issue. The black print definitely corresponds to R=0,B=0,G=0 and that's what I see in the documents. Question: what happens if you now change the B=254 back to B=255?

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

Hi Paul,

I have reverted the 'offending' text back to 255 and it printed in Blue! Created some new text in 255 and it also prints in blue, like the problem nver existed. Strange.
What I have now done is set my defaults to 250 and given red 5 and green 5 (my human eye can't spot any difference) which hopefully will 'fool' the 'colour reader' (whatever that is in the system) so it is not tempted to default 255 back to black. It seems to be working ok.

But like tyou say, I ought to be running 0: 0: 255 configuration without problems and I'd really like to get down to a postively permanent fix.

Gary

The more you describe it, the more it sounds like you had some corrupted content. And, if you copied the corrupted content from one document to another, the corruption would replicate itself to the new documents also.

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

You sound absolutely right. I was indeed using a generic(old) page as a template (because it had my headers/titles etc.) and now that I have destoyed that and re-created it is as though there never was a problem.
If it's gone - it's gone, and although we are curious people who find these things very frustrating I am so grateful for your assistance that you pointed me in the right direction.
Thanks again - for sticking with me.
Best,
Gary