@jackie_w: The difficult part is that for lots of books, the chapter or paragraph names vary a lot. So I guess that forces me to always use (*) at the beginning of the string. And perhaps this is exactly what freezes Word on large docs. Would I could do is identify all the books with headings that have a "chapter 1, chapter 2" structure, correct those with your 2 strings, and correct the rest manually.
I'll give that a try, thanks

@Oboe Joe: Yes, I'm using LDS Library 2005 & 2009. PM sent