Widow/Orphan control not working

[Mary]

Since our company upgraded to Word 2003, widow/orphan control does not work
with our templates. I'm not sure if this is a Word issue or a conflict with
our customized styles. Our template use a modified version of the Normal
style (Arial 11pt, left aligned, line spacing single, indents 0", spacing
after 6pt). Widow/orphan conrol is on but sometimes a single line is left
lonely at bottom or top of page. Why is this?

If I paste similar text into a document based on Word's default Normal.dot,
using the default Normal style in that template, there are no widow/orphans.
If I now modify that style to include 6pt after, there are still no
widow/orphan issues.

 

[Mary]

I forgot to say that I'm using Word 2003 on Windows XP. To add to the
mystery, if I copy text from one of our templates where the widow/orphan
issue is apparent into a new document based on Normal.dot and keep the
source formatting, the text behaves as it should, i.e., no widows/orphans.
Can there be something in the page layout overriding the paragraph
formatting defined in the styles? This issue happens not just to paragraphs
based on the Normal style but also with some of the heading styles.
Fortunately, we rarely use headings that run to more than one line, so that
is not such a big issue.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

It could be a problem of too many paragraphs formatted as "Keep with next,"
but it's also possible the document is just corrupt. See
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm