How to fix errant "new TOC" behavior in MS Word

[RichardOnRails]

I'm running MS Office Word 2003 SP3 over WinXP-Pro/SP3.

Earlier today, when I selected a group of indented lines and pressed
Ctrl-F9, I failed to see their backgrounds grayed as I expected. I
got around the problem by creating a new macro that changed the
background to gray and assigned Ctrl-F9 to it: problem solved.

Just now, I entered some text and assigned the Heading 3 property to
it. Then in a line or two above. I clicked Insert | Reference | Index
and Tables | Table of Contents. Instead of getting a TOC as I did
earlier today, I now got an indented string: {TOC \o "1-6"\h\z\u}

(I had to type in the string because I couldn't copy it from the Word
doc and paste it here, so the spacing may be off.)

Any idea what's going on with my machine? Any idea how to fix it or
investigate it further?

Thanks in Advance,
Richard

[RichardOnRails]

On Jan 6, 7:53 pm, RichardOnRails

Additional symptom: Inside the same Word document, I typed "http://
code.google.com/p/msysgit/" (sans quotes) and pressed Enter. I
expected the text to be converted to hyperlink, as usual, but instead
got the string:
{ HYPERLINK "http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/" }

Now I'm starting to suspect a virus, so I starting a scan.

Any other ideas would be most welcome,
Richard

[RichardOnRails]

On Jan 6, 8:22 pm, RichardOnRails

More info: My security package, Prev-X, found/cleaned 6 problematic
things. However, the symptoms didn't disappear :-(

[RichardOnRails]

On Jan 6, 8:22 pm, RichardOnRails
<RichardDummyMailbox58...@USComputerGurus.com> wrote:

My second post, when added the this thread, displayed the result I
got in my word document as the word "HYPERLINK" followed by a
hyperlink. That misrepresented what I got, name the text of the
hyperlink but not the markup of a hyperlink. Accurate communication
on Usenet/Google threads is tough "-(

Best wishes,
Richard