I work for a lawfirm, and one of our attorneys has been
having much trouble with some of his tables.  He has a
table that is about 120 rows or 60 pages of text that
will not sort.  I have already tried many things to fix
this and have come up with nothing.

Being versed in VBA, my first course of action was to
copy all the text into a new table in a new document.  I
wrote a procedure that stored the text in each cell in
an  array of strings (only the characters, no
formatting), and then put that in a new table.  I copied
over hyperlinks in the same way.  Now, the table sorts
fine, but the document is no longer formatted.

I send the document back to a legal asst. to be
formatted, which she does w/o using the format painter
and the original document.  However, after the document
is reformatted, the sorting problems are back.  Word will
either crash and give you doc. recovery/error reporting
screen, or it will tell you there is not enough memory
and disk space to sort the table.  It does this
regardless of the data type (text/date/number) and
regardless of whether header rows are included.  But as I
said it sorts smoothly and quickly when the text is not
formatted.  All available service packs and updates have
been installed on this WinXP machine (both for OS and
Office 2003).

Can anyone help?