A recent mail merge resulted in a Catalog (using Word 2003, so a Directory)
with random missing records. I believe I know what happened. It's a gotcha
that one would need to be aware of.

Using the Mail Merge Wizard, I setup a merge operation knowing that the
Access table had invalid records that would be printed in the Directory. At
one phase in the Wizard, one is given the opportunity to exclude records by
unchecking a box.

Later, I realized I needed to sort these records. (And one has to go
through the whole process of re-connecting to the database in order to get
at the sort mechanism.)

Now, the Dirctory was including the invalid records and dropping random (or
so it seemed) valid records.

Without any rigorous experimentation, it appears that Word 2003 is
remembering the excluded record positions across re-connections, so that
when the newly retrieved recordset is sorted, different records are
excluded than what were excluded earlier - based on record position, not
primary key index values (if present).

Can I get a corroborating experiment on this?