The spacing variations to which you refer are most likely affected by the before/after paragraph spacings. The gap between paragraphs is determined by the sum of the before/after spacing between them. Thus, when you have multiple consecutive paragraphs of the same Style, you'll have consistent spacing between them. If they have a 'before' spacing of 3pt and an 'after' spacing of 6pt, the inter-paragraph space will be 9pt. Similarly a different Style precedes or follows that Style, though, whatever 'after' space (say, 6pt) is set for the preceding paragraph's Style will be added to your current paragraph's 'before' spacing to compute the total spacing between the paragraphs. The same principles apply to the gap following your current paragraph.
Paragraph Styles apply to whole paragraphs, not to just selected portions. Also, if multiple paragraphs have the same Style applied and that Style has the 'update automatically' attribute applied, just changing the paragraph format for one such paragraph will update the Style and, with it, all paragraph's based on that Style.
Yes, you can keep your own Table of Contents - simply don't do the replacement from my last post, and put a ' in front of:
.TablesOfContents(1).Update
And yes, it's also possible to have multiple Tables of Contents that each apply to just a specified range. Simply bookmark the range and reference the bookmark in the TOC field. For example:
{TOC \o "1-2" \n "1-1" \b BookmarkName \h}
See: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/wo...005186201.aspx
Or you can have your separate documents - it's entirely up to you.

Mind you, the automated one is far more robust than your manual one, because it auto-updates to take account of edits or changes in pagination that sometimes occur when you change printers (yes, Word does that). For example if you add more content with new headings, click anywhere in the Table of Contents and press F9. New entries will be added automatically and the existing page numbers will adjust for any inserted/deleted content. Try that with your manual ones!

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