Get rid of gray brackets arond editable text in restricted Word docs

I'm trying to work out a problem in Word that I thought was simply a glitch from 2003 until we upgraded to 2010 and the problem persisted. For our corporate letterhead, we set up the template with placeholder text, highlight the text, and then make the document read-only with the exception of the selected text. The editable text turns yellow and gains these brackets around them: Once these brackets appear, they'll always show on the screen. That I can handle, though I'd like to learn how to hide them on-screen if that's possible. When the document is printed while protected, it works fine. When the document is printed while NOT protected, part of the bracket shows up on the paper! I guess the ultimate question is, how can I get rid of the brackets altogether? I can see why they exist but in my use case they create more problems than they solve. I'd like someone to be able to read the doc without seeing brackets, and I'd like other people in my department to be able to print without having to re-restrict it first. I tried to turn off bookmarks because that's what seemed to come up when I searched around, but that didn't do anything.

EDIT - 12/18/2012:

As requested in a comment below, here's a slimmed-down file that demonstrates the problem. Printing that should show the gray lines. If you protect it again it'll print okay, and if you remove all protection and exceptions it'll print okay.

• microsoft-word
• microsoft-word-2010
• microsoft-word-2003

asked Sep 24, 2012 at 20:31

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I can't reproduce it on my side, can you simplify your document and attach it somewhere?

Commented Dec 18, 2012 at 11:06

@Adam edited post to add! Thanks for your interest :)

Commented Dec 18, 2012 at 18:56

Thanks for that and sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I will post my finding as an answer.

Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 4:07