my Word 2003 is posessed!

I use Office/Word 2003 Pro in the home office to process documents on a weekly basis. The previous week's document is pulled up, and edited, sometimes rather heavily with large blocks being deleted and/or typed in.

Recently in the midst of deleting/editing, the document has begun taking on a life of its own, large blank blocks inserted, odd non-ascii characters, mostly square blocks, inserted. The document is at that point on it's way to infinity, is unsavable, unsalvagable.

First attempts to correct it, I rebooted the computer, then reinstalled Office. This weekend did a complete format - reinstall in WIN XP Pro. I've done a memory check, which turned up no errors, the hard drive has been re-partitioned and formatted, this time FAT32 - it formerly was NTFS.
The computer is a 2.4gig P4, with a 160 gig HD, 1.25 gig of ram, WIN XP Pro OEM.

Today, with a brand new windows and office installation - mid edit - the file went beserk again!
Switched the Open Office, and edited the same document without incident.

Could a virus or other "demon " be hiding in the word document? Where to begin?
Thanks in advance.

 

If the document is text only, you might try copying the whole thing and pasting into notepad, edit out anything that doesn't belong, then copy from notepad and paste into a new blank document.

 

Have you run Error Checking (chkdsk) on the drive/s? Edit: with a surface scan.

 

Many times problems in Word can be fixed by opeing the word program in safe mode. Try it,you may like it.

 

ALT+F8 will open the Macro window to show you if there is any identifiable code in the document.

from the Run line type "winword.exe /safe" to run in safe mode.

Have you tried switching keyboard and mouse?

 

I'm not sure this is the answer, but it IS resolution.

I've tried all the solutions proposed. No macro, virus, or other code has been able to be identified. Safe mode, plain text importing - nothing helped. It really seems to be some auto format/imported format incompatibility when subsequent editing brought them together in-document. They just "butted heads" and it all went south.

I have been using Microsoft Office 2000 for years.
Office 2003 was a Christmas gift (pretty nice gift!). I enthusiastically installed it, and the trouble started soon thereafter.
This week I un-installed Office 2003, and reinstalled my old copy of Microsoft Office 2000 Professional. It appears to me that whatever was causing the havoc, Office 2000 does not react like 2003 was doing.

It has been a quiet, uninterupted week. No problems, no crashes, nothing. One more instance in my slowly growing experience of how not every upgrade is necessarily "up ".

Like I said, I'm still unsure of the cause of the exact problem, but this has been, so far, an effective, workable solution. I will be giving my copy of Office 2003 to my son - I was happy with 2000 before, now even more so.