Here is a very mysterious (and frustrating) problem with Word 2003. I create a document, and everything looks fine, and I save and close the document. But when I re-open the document, one particular sentence or paragraph has been changed from Times New Roman to Symbols, so it looks like a bunch of Greek characters. I select those characters and change the font back to Times New Roman, and everything looks fine. I save and close the document. But then when I re-open the doucment, the same sentence or paragraph has been flipped back to Symbols.



There seems to be no way to fix the file, once this problem appears. No matter how many times you change the font, it always gets flipped back to Symbols after closing and re-opening the file. I've even tried completely deleting the affected sentence and re-typing it, but it continues to do the same thing.

Has anyone else ever encountered this? Is there any way to fix this problem?

Interesting... I've encountered the very same thing. It seems to occur most often in files that contain some superscripted symbols, especially minus signs. But I have no idea what causes it or how to fix it.