I am currently working at a Law office that handles intellectual property. 
This company started with Word 1 and has moved up to Word 6.0c.  They have 
use over 600 templates (yes, *.dot files) with a very sophiscated system for 
data entry.  The move to Word 6.0 occurred in November 1995.  At that time 
they did NOT recreate all the templates (many of the templates are pretty 
much identical with the boilermaker text being different--many of the macros, 
autotext, toolbars, keystrokes are the same).  The templates were "converted" 
and many of the macros still have Word 2 language in them (i.e., 
WW2_Template....)
About a couple of months ago, the firm started experiencing an increase in 
corrupt documents.  Most of these corruptions will cause a fatal Word error 
that "kicks" the user out of Word.  The corruption seems to fall in three 
categories:
1) Addition of extra section breaks.  These section breaks cannot be seen 
(even when saved to RTF and brought in as TEXT [a technique learned from Bob 
Davis]), however if you invoke the GoTo dialog box to move to the next 
section, you will find yourself between letters of a word with no indication 
that a section break exists.
2) Addition of extra field codes.  These field codes can only be seen if 
ToolsOptionsView Field Codes is set to always visible.  They also seem to 
have some "overlap" with the text; IOW, the spurious field code will be 
behind the text on the screen.
3) The final corruption is a keystroke behavior that I have personally 
experienced.  At certain places in the document, pressing the BACKSPACE key 
will delete several words up to half a paragraph.  Again, looking at the 
material saved as RTF and brought in as TEXT, I can see some difference in 
the "/--" RTF codes, but nothing that would lead me to derive a cause for the 
problem.
These corruptions are starting to cause a lot of lost production time; and is 
plain frustrating.  They can occur very quickly, i.e., someone types a 
document, closes it, the next day opens it, and it is corrupt--one person 
only working on the document.
Oh, one other point.  I have theorized after learning the history of PC word 
processing in the office (before Word 1.0, they did not word process on PCs), 
that the "cause" for the problems is because the templates were not created 
new, from a new Word 6.0 Normal.dot, but that they were converted.  
Therefore, the templates are to cause.  One of the reasons for this belief is 
that only certain templated documents become corrupt. Therefore, on last 
Friday (9/27) when I was attempting to determine the reason for the backspace 
key anomaly in the document, I selected the entire document and copied it 
into another templated document (patent template to a letter template).  The 
corruption disappeared.  All other copying (even Paste Special, unformatted) 
didn't make any difference.
Just for the record, these anomalies are not a result of any "concept" virus. 
 The system is quite protected--most I have ever seen--from them.
Have anyone else experienced this level of corruption?  Have you solved it?
Bob Davis, I know that you folks use Word in a high production setting. Have 
you had this problem?  I have not experienced it prior to this new job (6 
weeks old).  However, my Word experience was very similar to yours--move from 
WPDOS5.1 to Word, not a Word 1 to 2 to 6 experience.
Thanks for any input.  I have attempted to cite the facts as clearly and in 
depth as I can.  I can't really provide too much more information.  Many 
things have been attempted, many attempts at the suggestion of Microsoft. 
Assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Lawrence
... Be Gentile? ... And ruin my Heathen image?
--- FMail 1.0g
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