Paragraph styles / text formatting is making my indesign file crash

I had a friend try that a few weeks back, something to do with a "ai" file in the c drive folder for indesign, or do you mean something else? I really don't know how either way so I'm all ears, thanks.

I only have Photoshop here at work, but you can probably figure it out based upon this - just look for Indesign\version#\settings.

C:\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAMEGOES HERE\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop\9.0\Adobe Photoshop CS2 Settings

FONTS, try using different fonts for the styles.  Could be a bad font that is screwing everything up. When I first started working for the newspaper we had fonts from everywhere and lots of times they didn't play nicely.  Eventually we ended up buying the adobe font set for overall consistancy and relialbility.  I think you can download a free demo of fontagent at http://www.fontagent.com  

We have the same problem here. Unfortunatly, i have no solution. The weird part is that we have a document that works fine. We tryed to make a master and do a clean up un the style sheet (because there will be many document that will need to be done) to standardize the process but since then, the Indesign Crashes. The font is the same and there are only one font. FontDoctor doesn't see a problem with it.

I am on a Mac and the text come from differents PC Word. With text1, we can work for an hour before it crashes but with text2, it crashes after 2 min and it's the same master. Of course, we are using the old master since it work.

I apologize for the delayed response but in this time I've better learned about the problem although I wouldn't say it's a "fix" just a way around the problem. I forgot to mention before that the text being cut and paste into indesign was from a word document. Normally that's not worth mentioning but in this case it is apparently.
if I simply hit "select all" in a word document, copy it then paste it into a text box in indesign it does as you would expect it to, everything is translated to indesign the way it's set to. However when you do a "select all" in a word document you're getting more than just the text as you know, you're getting the linebreaks, the tabbed spaces, all this extra unwanted stuff. When I simply put in the text and nothing else I never got this problem. I can also say this because I had this happen on another file that I had just made and with a font that had never given me a problem, then the moment I cut and paste everything from a word document it would act bizarre, then when I just cut and paste the text no problem.

my conclusion is that the problem is to do with a "code collision" involving how certain fonts in indesign interpret things other than text when cut and pasted from elsewhere and this still would normally not cause the program to crash, but in my case I had text travelling between several text boxes and with several different type styles and when that one style was applied to an entire word document cut and pasted it behaved so long as it didn't force any of the text in that linked text box to move into the next box, if it did, it would crash.
So all I can say is change the font or be sure you're not cutting and pasting anything besides the actual text from a word document if this is happening to you. I don't consider this a solution, just a way of getting around a problem without actually solving it.

heh, I guess what you don't see does hurt you in this case. It does look like we've narrowed it down pretty good as to why this rare problem does happen. I don't personally understand how you managed to single out the offending characters or what you mean by "anchoring" a text box with just the rabid characters inside, how did you lock text inside a text box that is linked both ways into other text boxes ? assuming that is what you did. I wasn't aware you could even anchor text boxes in indesign aside from locking their position. You obviously have seen a lot more of these glitches than I have and thanks for your help on the matter.

Did you ever try deleting your prefrences???

Well, I am not saying it IS the preferences, but over the years, you would be surprise how many seemingly unrelated issues have been resolved by deleting the preferences - not just in CS either and sometimes shared across different systems. Usually, if something goes awry, that is the first thing I try.