1. Can you spell out what you mean by

"When I debug the merge process, there
are *no* merge fields listed in the document, but the finished document has
the fields listed."

There's a starting document called the Mail Merge Main Document, and a
result document (when you merge to a new document, that is). Which contains
what, and how are you finding out?

2. The chances are the the .NET tool is not looking for fields in all the
StoryRanges in the document. Detecting /all/ fields in a document is
non-trivial (in fact, evidence suggests that it may not be possible) but the
following code should catch most of them:

Dim objStory As Range
Dim objField As Field

For Each objStory In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges
 For Each objField In objStory.Fields
   ' do what you want to the field here
 Next
' The header/footer ranges can be linked in a way
 ' that is not revealed by the outer For Each
 ' so we have to do the following
 While Not (objStory.NextStoryRange Is Nothing)
   Set objStory = objStory.NextStoryRange
   For Each objField In objStory.Fields
     ' do what you want to the field here
   Next
 Wend
Next objStory

Set objStory = Nothing
Set objField = Nothing

2. What kind of merge is the user performing? Fields in the header/footer
are likely to behave differently in Catalog/Directory merges than they do in
Letter merges.

Peter Jameieson