XP Pro. Word 2002 +SP2

I have just spent a very frustrating day trying to make Arial Unicode MS
work properly.

I have a doc of 871 pages, with lots of linguistic examples from languages
that require special characters. I am supposed to submit this doc to a
publisher by Dec. 10, and I have to use a Unicode font for the linguistic
examples. The problem is certain Unicode characters always seem to have big
spaces following them, like this:
w?   runkam?   n
There is not supposed to be a space after ? or ?. Please tell me how to fix
this. I have downloaded a couple other Unicode fonts, and they all do this,
so I think it must be something in Word. I don't want to condense just those
characters, because I have no idea what the publisher's word processor will
do with the special formatting (they have warned me not to include nonce
formatting just for appearance sake). Please help!

Tom