Hi, Howard, I had the exact same problem. I discovered that the problem was an override.
I was working on a manual. I named the paragraph tag for my figure titles "Figure". When I copied portions of text with graphics from another file into my manual, everything appeared to be just dandy, but a few days later, I noticed the numbering snafoo. The other file that I copied from had the same paragraph tag "Figure" for figure titles, so I just assumed they were the same. They weren't. In the Numbering properties, one had "Figure: <n+>" and the other had "FIGURE: (n+> ". Here's how I solved the problem. In my manual, I found a figure title that had the numbering that I wanted, selected it, then clicked update. FM said there were overrides, and I clicked Remove Overrides, and things have been happy ever since. Matt