Page Backgrounds in Different Office Versions

[enjay]

We recently upgraded from Office XP to a mixture of Office 2003 and 2007, and since doing so, we've noticed a problem with page backgrounds in Word. If you use a patterned one, for example, graduated colours across the page, dark on the left, light on the right, this appears fine on screen but the pattern comes out duplicated on the page. Rather than a single gradual colour shift across the page, the shift happens in a few centimetres and then repeats, kind of like tiled wallpaper backgrounds.

New Office 2003 and 2007 files exhibit this, but if you open a previously saved Office XP file in 2003, the background prints as expected.

It could be that this can't be resolved, but I would like to play with it a little bit before giving up and putting it on the "buggy Microsoft" pile.

[Geoff]

I'd suspect either a printer driver problem or something wrong with the normal.dot

[enjay]

Printer drivers are presumably okay since the new file and the old file were being printed from the same PC to the same printer. normal.dot problems are plausible, I suppose.

[pallen]

We have had this problem, but never got to check it out. We tend to use different software if the pupils are going to be doing full page designs. As such it was never deemed necessary and I was too busy to investigate it further. We had tried different Driver versions as we had some problems with software printing out rubbish but it was so long ago now that I cant remember what the problems were exactly.

Can you post your fix if you manage to sort it please? By the way ours was a fresh install of Office 2003 on XP clients.