I am aware of the problems. However, we were faced with a situation in
which we had a short timeline to produce a 300+ page document with a
single table of contents and a set of indexes that cross-referenced
the entire document. The only way was to do this was to allow multiple
authors/editors to work on the document simultaneously. In the early
stages I was just pulling the pieces into a monolithic Word document
as they were completed, but that document got corrupted, so I settled
on the master/subdocument approach as a way to facilitate the group
editing process and minimize the impact of any future file corruption
issues.

I actually found the source of my problem. The problem was that there
were bookmark names and index entries duplicated across subdocuments.
There were several factors contributing to this problem, including
copying text from one subdocument to another or cloning one
subdocument to another as a starting point for editing. I wrote a
macro that traversed the master and subdocuments checking for
duplicates and then made the appropriate corrections. That resolved
the problem. Thanks.

Bill Buntain