Hi Lorrae

The following things may help:

* Make sure you have applied the latest updates - there was a bug in Word
2002 first release that caused ever-appending char chars

* Turn off the Edit option to 'Keep track of formatting', apart from when
you actually need to see the information it provides in the styles and
formatting pane.

* Avoid using a paragraph style as a character style (this can happen
accidentally if you have part of a paragraph selected when you attempt to
apply a para style).

* To remove the char styles, see

http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/MyFavTip.htm#CharStyl

I would be worried by the 'cross-talk' between styles and by the application
freezing - sounds like a document corruption is on the way, and this could
be a good moment to build a clean template.