Spontaneous Changes to the Normal Style

P

Paul Schmidt

I'm working in Word 2002 and lately have experienced the normal style and/or
the table normal style spontaneously acquiring three attributes:

Line spacing of at least 18 points
Full justification
Font alignment: Baseline

This usually occurs after the undo of a modification of a style based on the
normal but has also occured upon the application of such a paragraph style to
text. It has also occured upon a full paste (i.e. not a "paste unformatted
text").

The phenomenon is inconsistent in its occurrence in that it is not reliably
repeatable. It has occurred in documents based upon my normal template as
well as documents based on other templates. Compatability options do not
appear to be a factor.

The only realiable way I have found to fix the problem once it occurs is to
copy in a new normal style or table normal from my normal.dot via Organizer.

Has anyone experienced this or have any insight as to why it might be
occuring?
 
P

Paul Schmidt

Thank you, Anne, but I believe there has to be something more to it as I have
been able to cause the normal style to "pop" in a brand new document simply
by modifying styles based on the normal style and then clicking "undo". I'm
investigating the undo list now.
 
B

Bruce

I'm perplexed by this. I'm getting precisely the same occasional
reformatting, only I *do not* have Automotic Update checked on my Normal
style (where it seems to manifest). Would a Macro virus do something like
this?

Peace,
Bruce Farrell
 
B

Bruce

Does anyone have an answer for this?

Bruce said:
I'm perplexed by this. I'm getting precisely the same occasional
reformatting, only I *do not* have Automotic Update checked on my Normal
style (where it seems to manifest). Would a Macro virus do something like
this?

Peace,
Bruce Farrell
Click to expand...
 
D

Dale

Hi, Bruce, I can't really shed any light on the problem, but I've heard that
it is connected in some way with a hotfix. I don't know for sure if this is
actually the case. Hopefully someone will respond who can tell us more about
the problem and its resolution.
 
P

Paul Schmidt

Sorry to be so late in responding. It is, indeed, related to a hotfix. Let
me recap:

After my initial queary I did further testing in my network environment and
determined that the problem occurred after a seemingly random number of
"undo" actions. One of the things perplexing me was that no matter how I
tried I could not trigger the change at some workstations. Closer
investigation showed that the seemingly "imune" workstations were running a
Word.exe file dated a few months earlier than those workstations where the
normal style would "pop". This led to the question of what had changed in
our Word environment between the date of the "imune" exe and the susceptible
one. The answer was one particular critical hotfix that we had distributed.
Unfortunately, I don't know precisely which one. If I can get clearance from
my Dept. Head I will post the answer.

Microsoft has forwarded us a patch for the hotfix that appears to have
solved the problem.
 
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