Helen -

A rather drastic "fix" for the degenerate CRs relies on the observed behaviour that Edit|Find ^p - the normal search for CRs in Word - can't find them.

You use Edit | Replace, "Find ^p" and "Replace With" something that won't otherwise be found in the document, such as "@@%@," Replace All.

All the good CRs will disappear. The only ones remaining should be the ones that are "corrupt." You should be able to scan/scroll through to find them visually fairly easily.

After you replace/fix the phony ones, you can use Edit | Replace and replace @@%@ with ^p to restore (Replace All) the missing CRs.

It does take a strong stomach and some considerable courage to deliberately delete all the paragraph breaks in a document you've slaved over, but this method does work FOR SIMPLE DOCUMENTS.

One problem with this method - and it's a big one - is that any paragraph formatting you've applied to individual paragraphs will be lost when the ^p is removed, so the method absolutely should NOT BE USED if you're using formal layout methods.

You could apply the method to a copy of a formatted document to find any broken CRs and then manually fix them in the "real document" perhaps.

I've used the method on some very large documents (after changing the filename and making sure the backup is safe), but only when everything is in "Normal" paragraph style. (Character formats like italics and bold, and font changes, are usually ok if not applied by a paragraph style.) I wouldn't think of trying it on most of my better work; but then the bad CRs only seem to show up when I push the limits - like sorting repeatedly in 300-page-at-a-time batches and such.

John