Word keeps repaginating

[ImRic]

I have a 300 page document that I generate in Word-97. When I open the
document in either Word-2000 or Word-2003, only the first 24 pages of the
document come into memory (per the section/page counter in the lower left
part of the status bar).

As soon as you scroll past page 24, Word will repaginate the entire document
every time a page boundary is passed. This happens so often and takes so
much time (with this big document) that editing is essentially out of the
question.

It's seems like this is a virtual memory problem (since the whole document
doesn't come into Word when it's opened) but I can't find a setting to fix
the problem. I've got enough memory on the three machines in question (Word
97, Word 2000 & Word 2003) that it's not a physical memory issue.

In this helps: the Word 97 machine is running Windows 2000 and the two
other machines are running XP (Pro).

This is, of course, happening in Print Layout view. Working in Normal View
isn't an option as there is a lot of artwork sprinkled throughout the text,
and the overall layout/pagination has to be controlled.

Thanks in advance to anyone that knows how to fix this problem!

 

[ImRic]

Actually, the document was created in Word-2000. It works fine there (Word
brings the whole document into memory... you can see the page count in the
status bar go through the entire document and when pulling the vertical
scroll bar, Word will show what page you're at so you can stop wherever you
specifically want).

The versions of Word where the file doesn't work are Word-2002 and
Word-2003. It's even worse than I described below; towards the end of the
document you can barely scroll a line or two and the whole document
repaginates. It's completely useless to try and edit.

What did MS do between Word 2000 and 2002/2003? Or is there a setting
somewhere I'm missing? I can't find it if it exists.

 

[ImRic]

For anyone that's interested, I found and fixed the problem. It was related
to a table in the header. Actually, there was a header on a cover sheet
(that exists in its own section), then an inner "title page" that had no
header (also in its own section). The title page is followed by the bulk of
the document, which contains multiple sections, but starting at this point
had all of the headers linked ("use same as previous").

The main section had the same header as the front cover sheet (with embedded
table).

I'm not sure why this made Word go "bonkers". But I saw where KB292161
talked about repagination problems in files with tables in the headers. (But
I didn't have a nested table, and change tracking was not on, etc., etc.)

Oh well... didn't want to do it but put the header on the title page and
linked the headers throughout the entire document. This solved the problem
with Word 2003. I haven't tried a machine with Word 2002 yet, but assume the
problem will be solved there too.