How can I run a light-grey screen behind a display ad in indd?

Question

Either I'm doing something terribly wrong or you haven't told me something I really need to know (and the manual is extremely difficult to learn from). We're back at my wife's bimonthly newsletter and she wanted to set a short paragraph in a box with a 15 percent screen behind it. To get the box with the screen, I used the Rectangle tool with a 15 percent fill; to get the text, I used the text tool, drawing a box slightly smaller than the rectangle so the text would be pleasantly placed in relation to the 15 percent screen of the box.
I first tried placing the text on the Default Layer and the box and screen on a new layer, Layer 3. (In my system, the Default Layer is red and Layer 3 is green.) The grey screen completely obliterated the text: the page printed with a grey screen and no text. I then tried placing the box and grey screen on the Default Layer and the text on Layer 3. Same thing: an empty grey screen with no words in it.
So I returned to the text in a smaller red text box in the Default Layer and the Rectangle Tool box in green on Layer 3 above it. The text disappeared. By holding down the Command key, I could see the red box where my text should have been; by clicking on the plus sign in the lower-right corner of the red box, I could place the text I had already placed in the red box on the Default Layer. But it spread out to the width of the box in the green Layer 3, and I could not adjust its width to match the size of my original text box on the red Default Layer.
I tried locking the text box on the Default Layer (in which case I could not place the text); I tried locking the box and screen on Layer 3; neither helped. No matter what I did, the text would not appear at the width specified in the red Default Layer, but spread out to fill the box and screened area of the green Layer 3.
Before we upgraded our InDesign CS2 about six months ago, we did this regularly, and it always worked: we'd place the text, draw a box with the Rectangle Took and a 15 percent fill, select the filled rectangle, and click "Send to Back." That always worked; why does the upgraded InDesign not do the same thing? Or what am I missing?

Answer 1

New question, URGENT. I'm placing text in ordinary columns in InDesign CS2, where the master pages show two columns just over 31/2 inches wide and 10 inches deep and the text to be placed comes from MS Word (2008 version for Macintosh). On three occasions this morning, InDesign has created roughly 14-point spaces between lines in the text where nothing shows in the Word text at all. In the first case, we had such a space in an article in column one and an identical space appeared in a different article in column two, as though InDesign knew of a trough in the page that we couldn't see. I've just placed a Word article in column one on another page that has two of these unnecessary breaks, one about six lines into the text and one about six lines from the bottom. I cannot get rid of these unwanted breaks: attempting to edit with the Text tool simply creates merged words without normal word spacing.
Help!