InDesign CS3 crashes when applying styles to pasted text with formatting.

Question

Running InDesign CS3, v. 5.0.2 on Windows XP, SP2
InDesign is crashing whenever I do the following:
1. Paste or place text from Microsoft Word -- with existing formatting preserved.
2. Apply any character or paragraph style to that text.
This happens 100% of the time when I try to recreate the error. It happens on more than one computer. It never used to happen in IDCS2. It's not a missing font issue.
I've tried recreating the InDesign preference files, but it didn't work. (See help file at http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb400616&sliceId=1)
Any suggestions would be hugely appreciated! This is slowing down my work a ton, and manually adding things like underline is killing me. If it persists, I'll have to roll back to CS2. :(

Answer 1

We had exactly the same issue - but it only seemed to happen when a "Hyperlink" character style came in with the pasted text. In fact, the crash only happened when we tried to apply a paragraph style to a paragraph that had a hyperlink in it.
Our solution: before we try to do anything else, we delete the "Hyperlink" character style. I can't guarantee that this will solve your issue, but it has worked for us (so far!) in those rare cases when we cut & paste Word text.
We have never had this issue when we import ("Place") the Word file - that's generally a better workflow anyway.
-Bill