Reply To: word and letter spacing

I've learned to watch for the following:
1) On documents converted from Xpress, change the paragraph styles kerning option to Optical, then back to Metrics. This can clear out an over-riding setting. I haven't found this to be needed in a 'fresh' indd file.

2) Be sure that your new justification settings are applied to all paragraph styles (using the 'based on' feature.) It's a bit a of a pain, but I make a master style for body text that has the correct settigns, then always 'base' on that. To verify, I can temporarily change the color of this master style and watch where it migrates to in the document.

What fonts are you using? Are they possibly old and not well kerned to begin with? If this is the case, you might consider optical kerning which can bypass a poorly kerned font.