man o man i feel your pain with the big word files. i regularly write and edit 40+ page documents for work with tables, graphs, ToCs, footnotes etc and it took awhile for me to really learn Word the way it's supposed to be known. it's a great program and now that i know how to do everything properly rather than "manually" i don't tend to have these buggy issues. i didn't know the F9 trick, i'll have to try that next time. good luck with your work Blane!