Word & Adobe 8 not playing well together (Word 2003 SP2)

[ggglmi]

I realize that this is a Word forum not Adobe, but HELP, I am desperate!!!

I am working in Acrobat Professional 8.1.0 on a Network at work. We operate under Windows XP and are using MS Office 2003.

I have created a table of contents (TOC) using RD codes in Word. When I PDF the TOC either from within Word using "Convert to Adobe PDF" or from Explorer using "Combine supported files in Acrobat," any manual changes that I have made to the Word file inside the generated table of contents codes (manual line breaks, manual page breaks, removal of extra spaces, etc.) are lost in the PDF. You can see these manual changes being lost in the Word file on the screen, yet the manual changes remain in the Word (.doc) file when Adobe is done.

If I PDF the TOC file from within Word using "File, Print, Adobe PDF" all manual changes are retained in the resulting PDF.

HINT OF THE PROBLEM: I moved the Word TOC file to a folder by itself and told it to "Convert to Adobe PDF"; the conversion occurred, but this time the Adobe file gave me error messages saying "Error! Cannot open reference files on page vii"-- this is the same error message I receive when I regenerate a table of contents from within Word and the TOC files are not in the same folder as the other files to find the information. Yet the list of figures and tables remained the same.

Something in Acrobat is forcing the information in the TOC-styled fields to "update" when I don't want this to happen. This did not happen in Acrobat 7. Is there some setting I must turn off or is this a new "feature" in Adobe 8?

Thanks in advance for any help!
gg

[HansV]

Does it help if you turn off (clear) the check box "Update fields" in the Print tab of Tools | Options... in Word?