Squished Fonts in Word 2003

I've had a client that had a problem with Word 2003 all of a sudden switching the document's font and squishing it all into 1 narrow column on the left side of the document. Switching the printer to another printer would temporarily fix the problem, but it would typically reoccur in a short period of time.

The problem seems to be that Word leaves behind some corrupt temporary files. Cleaning up these files eliminates the problem (until more files get left behind).

I'm not sure what causes the corruption, but here's how you can fix it...

Note: If squished fonts happen, don't save the document with the squished fonts back to the original file name, just to avoid hurting your original. The first rule of Tech Support is "first, do no harm".

Note: Make backups of your files and make sure they are good.

Note: Proceed at your own risk. These steps work for me, but may not work for you. These steps worked with Windows XP, other versions of Windows may have your TEMP files in a different location.

1. If you have any recoverable documents due to a crash, you'll want to recover them before continuing. You may not be able to get them back, if you proceed with these steps.
2. Close Word (and to be safe, any other Office applications)
3. Click Start/Run
4. Type: cmd and press Enter
5. Type: cd %TEMP% and press Enter
6. You should be in a folder that looks like this:
   "C:\DOCUME~1\username\LOCALS~1\Temp"
   or
   "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp"
   Depending on your setup, your TEMP directory could be in some other location.
7. Type EXACTLY: del *.tmp ~*.* and press Enter
   Doing this step wrong or in the wrong place could be fatal to your system.
8. Type: exit and press Enter

That should do it. Open your problematic document and it should be fine.