A rare, but not totally unknown, "feature" that appears in Word occasionally is a "corrupted ¶." It seems to happen most often in larger documents where there are lots of cut 'n pastes and inserts, but occasionally shows up if very large selections have been repeatedly sorted (Table|Sort).

When you select an image, by clicking on the image, it does NOT show negative in recent Word versions. It only "goes negative" if it's included in a selection that has both the image and some text.

When you click in the left margin, the selection is everything in the line adjacent to where you click, which would include a picture and at least the carriage return to which the picture is attached, which is the reason that clicking there shows the image in negative colors. (An inserted image always "anchors" to a ¶.)

Although I've never seen it happen, it's possible that a picture clipped to one of these mangled carriage returns would display as you're seeing.

The ¶ that you see if you turn on display of carriage returns marks the end of a paragraph, but also is a rather complex and mysterious object. It includes features of the "newline" character that moves the "insertion point" back to the start of the line, plus the "linefeed" character that advances the point to the next line, but also acts as a "bookmark" so that edits saved at the end of the file until a "full save" is done can be "pointed to the right paragraph," and it "contains" the paragraph style information for the entire paragraph to which it's attached.

I have NOT FOUND ANY METHOD FOR CREATING one of these "defective CRs" which makes it very difficult to convince people that they do occur, but there are two simple methods that will reveal one if it happens to occur. You need to turn on display of the Paragraph marks. In Word, Tools|Options, on the View Tab, in the Section marked "Formatting Marks" put a check in the box beside "Paragraph marks."

Method 1:

You normally search for "paragraph marks" using Edit|Find (or Ctl-F) and type "^p" (without quotes) in the Find what box. If you click somewhere above the suspect mark, and step through successive "Find Next" steps, the search will skip the mangled ones. The "defective" ones aren't really paragraph marks so they can't be found by searching for them, but can be detected by "not finding" them.

Method 2: (Using | to show a cursor position)

If you click to the right of a paragraph marker, the insertion point should jump to a location just to the left of the marker. You should get:

       |¶

The "mark" is one of the "funny ones" if the cursor goes to a position just after the mark, like:

       ¶|

Since I don't know of a way to "create" one of these defective marks, I can't make one to clip a picture to in order to see if it might do what you're getting, but you should be able to tell if your funny image is attached to one just by clicking and looking at where the cursor lands.

On the remote chance that you might find one, just deleting the ¶ and inserting a new one sometimes "passes" the defect to the new one. I've found it best to set the insertion point at the end of the paragraph preceding the corrupted one and hit Enter a couple of times, then put the insertion at the beginning of the paragraph that follows the "defective" one and hit Enter a couple of times, then select at least three consecutive lines of s with the bad one in the middle and delete them all. You can then adjust to the correct number of paragraph breaks (and reinsert the picture).

Again - this is a very rare thing, and I have no way to tell if it could be part of your problem; but it's maybe worth looking to see if your CRs are all good ones.

John