My work involves reformatting a long series of documents that all must be
formatted in a very particular way.  I've written a battery of macros,
most of them involving find-and-replace operations, to help make this
process less tedious and error-prone.  I have one "master" macro that
essentially fires off the rest of them all in a row.

At least once a day, I find that the macros stop working.  It looks as
if the find part of the find-and-replace operations works, but the
replace part stops working!  After this happens, it doesn't matter
whether I fire off all the macros at once or I pick out a single macro
at random and try that.  The replacement operations just stop working.

Now here's the workaround I've found.  If I *manually* do my own trivial
find operation--say, hit Control-F, enter a space for the find text,
and hit "Find Next"--then all the macros and their find-and-replace
operations start working again the very next time I try them.

This is an annoying problem to deal with, though.  I need to keep a
sharp eye on the document being reformatted in order to notice when
the macros have stopped working, and then do my workaround.  And, of
course, I'd really prefer not to let the macros fail like this in the
first place.  I just don't know whether it's something I'm doing wrong
or if this really is a strange bug in Word 2000.  (If so, heaven help
me, as I don't expect my company to upgrade Office anytime soon.)

Since this seems to happen sporadically and with any kind of
find-and-replace operation, I'm afraid there is no more specific
information I can give in order to recreate this.  If I *could*
recreate it reliably, then I wouldn't be asking for help here. :-)

Please note, I am already heeding the advice in Microsoft's Knowledge
Base article number 212680, and that does not seem to be helping.

Thanks in advance...

Can't help you troubleshoot code without seeing the code. :)

I understand.  Believe me, if I could narrow down the problem to just
the barest amount of code that reproduces the problem, I would post it
here.  But so far that has proven to be elusive.  (And if I could do
that, I'd be a long way toward solving the problem on my own.)  I was
hoping that this was a more general problem that someone else has
already run into.

Let me try to rephrase and boil down the question:  Under what
circumstances would macro-based find-and-replace operations (i.e.
Selection.Find.Exectute) just silently stop working, only to start
working again after a manual find (i.e. Control-F) is done?