Word 2003 bizarre underline behavior

[Gregg Hill]

Hello!

I have an XP SP2 system with fully patched XP and Office 2003 Professional.
When I highlight one word in a sentence by starting on the left and
highlighting toward the right (beginning to end of word) and then click on
the underline toolbar button or hit Ctrl-U to underline the word, it
highlights and underlines the word and everything to the right of the word,
all the way to the end of the line, including spaces. If I highlight the
word from right to left (end to beginning of word) and then hit the
underline button, it highlights and underlines the space following the word
and everything else to the end of the sentence, but does NOT underline the
word itself.

If I start Word in Safe Mode with the /a switch, it behaves normally. The
two other buttons for bold and italics both work normally.

I Googled but could not find an answer and could find nothing in Word's help
files. I have deleted the normal.dot template but the behavior continues.

Any ideas what is causing this weird behavior?

Thank you!

Gregg Hill

 

[Lene Fredborg]

The problem could be that a macro named "Underline" is found somewhere in
Normal.dot, in the attached template or in an add-in. A macro with that name
will run instead of the built-in "Underline" command and it is possible to
create a macro that does exactly what you describe (even though I don't know
why one would do that).

Select Tools > Macro > Macros. You should see a list of all available macros
if "Macros in" is set to "All available templates and documents". If you see
a macro named "Underline", find out where it is located by setting the
"Macros in" to each of the available options. If the macro is stored in a
place you have access to, select the "Underline" macro and click "Edit" in
the "Macros" dialog box - try to rename the macro to something else and test
whether the underline problem is gone (for the change to remain, you need to
save the template in question). If you do not have access to the "Underline"
macro (e.g. because it is in a password-protected add-in), select Tools >
Templates and Add-Ins in and try to turn off the add-in that is causing the
problem.

If you need help on the above, I think that the following articles may help
you:
http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/customization/CheckIfAddinsInstalled.htm

--
Regards
Lene Fredborg
DocTools - Denmark
www.thedoctools.com
Document automation - add-ins, macros and templates for Microsoft Word

 

[Gregg Hill]

Lene,

I will take a look at your suggestions. it is my father-in-law's computer,
so it may take a few days to get to it. He told me today that it now
underlines the entire document!

Gregg Hill

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

That behavior could be a result of the problem described in
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/WholeDocumentReformatted.htm

 

[Gregg Hill]

Suzanne,

I will look at that document again today. I had checked that one a few days
ago, but it did not have the "Automatically update" checkbox marked in the
first place, so I thought it was not the solution.

I should have a chance this evening to look at it again.

Thank you!

Gregg Hill

 

[Gregg Hill]

Lene,

You are a genius! He had a macro named Underline. I deleted it, and
everything behaves as expected.

Thank you!

Gregg Hill