According to the OP, though, "On the Mac, everything looks and prints just fine" - it's only "when viewed and printed on a PC, about 5mm of the first two text boxes are cut off". I'm thus more inclined to believe it's a fault on the particular PC (unless, of course, deleting the images has affected the layout so we can't see their effect).

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

Exactly. And it's not just with one particular PC, but I've sent it to several colleagues that work on PCs, and the same problem appears on all of them.

I tried cropping the background image into two parts, header and footer, so there is no background image where the affected text boxes are but that didn't yield any results.

I'm starting to think I'm just going to have to do it again from scratch, using the three column layout thing. Not what I wanted to do really, but I'm thinking I don't have much of a choice at this point ...