Hi Andy:
I got it working, but it was so mysterious. I was able to copy the content to a new file and it worked right away. So I went back to your file and was able to stop it from deleting the content (by removing replace TOC), but the TOC wouldn't grab any content. I finally removed your custom TOC style from Layout > Table of Contents Styles so that I could start over, and it worked perfectly. While I'm glad it is now working, I can't tell you specifically what was wrong. I looked closely at the before and after and couldn't identify anything.
I'm guessing you can recreate this on your own, but I'm going to put the file I created back up on dropbox for you. I see that you are using an earlier version than CC 2017, so I'll save mine as an .idml file. If you want to use mine, just open it, and save it as a normal .indd file.
Dropbox - AndyTOC.idml
~Barb
Thanks a million for that Barb, I am seriously impressed at the speed of your resolving this. You process seems obvious, but I hadn’t pinpointed it . The click seems to be in the custom TOC style. Yours presumably is the app default. Ill work on that as a basis.
Adobe took my payment in May they should have sent 2017 to download, I;’ll chase that up.
Thanks again for your very prompt and successful help
andyT