While some people claim to have gotten Pagemaker to work on Win 7, I have never heard anyone getting it to reliably create pdfs. Stick to your windows XP machine, pagemaker was unstable enough on a platform it was rated to use. windows 7 and Pagemaker don't mix, look to the dozens of threads on the subject.
Document corruption sounds likely.
Diagnostic recompose ( from PageMaker for Desktop Publishers)
Hold down the Shift and Alt/Option keys while choosing "Hyphenation" from the Type menu. Do this with the pointer tool clicked and no objects selected. The result will be one or more beeps:
- One beep means PageMaker didn't find a problem. This does not necessarily mean there is nothing wrong, just that nothing was found.
- Two beeps means PageMaker found and fixed a problem.
- Three beeps means PageMaker found a problem it could not repair.
Most problems are with fonts, or graphics. Disable the fonts that you use in the publication and try to create a pdf, if it works enable each font one at a time and create a pdf, repeat until you can isolate the problem font.
If the pdf will not work with all of the fonts disabled look to the graphics. Create a pdf of each individual page until you find the page with the problem and then look to the graphics on that page. Graphics should be placed, not pasted into pagemaker, tiff and eps are the most reliable formats. I always resized my graphics to fit at 100% so as to avoid large preview images, which helps avoid corruption.
Jay