Yes I am using the built in TOC function. I’m thinking I may have sorted out the issue. But really I couldn’t say for sure that it did. Actually I went through and deleted some of the styles it seemed to be using though I’m not sure how they got applied in the first place.
And incidentally I want to thank you for your response and I have to ask for the indulgence of you and the others on the forum as sometimes Adobe just has me pulling my hair out.

Which brings me back to something that could be the source of some of these difficulties.

I still can’t identify which style is the one that InDesign is creating for the TOC that it is producing.

In the process of learning to use Indesign I’m going through the various and sundry videos on the subject. In one such video the presenter commented that Indesign does in fact create this style and that you can go back and edit that style. However try as I may I have yet to find or identify any such style. No doubt some of the problem is that I have created my own such file with various names like “TOC Recipe Entry” and “TOC Section Header” etc. etc.
Never the less Tis is exactly why it would be a remarkably cool thing to be able to clear Indesign’s cash of TOC configurations i.e. paramaters.

Yeah I get that but I guess I’m wanting to do something that Indesign simply isn’t suited to.

So let me ask you; After reading the scenario I outlined above how might I best achieve my goal? Please don’t suggest building the whole thing in a single .indd file. I’ve already taken a stab at that and if that’s my only option I’m closing indesign forever and moving on to MS Word.

Hmmm… so maybe this idea can work. How about if I make those single page .indd files i.e. “Breakfast” etc chapters and organize the numbering around them. Can I restart the numbering after each title file. Or for that matter can I number those title files differently from the chapter files
In other words can I number the chapter files 1 – 20 while numbering the title files i.e. “Breakfast”, “Dinner” etc. 1 – 4 applying styles so the title files / names use a bold font and the chapter names / file use a regular font.
Might this be a way of circumventing forgetting the whole “Section” notion while still achieving essentially the same results?

In the end I’m trying to find a way to produce the Section concept while using the book approach.

Let’s say for instance I wanted to create a book like “War and Peace” and I had 1000s of pages with many chapters and I needed to divide those chapters into subdivisions or “Sections” How might I do this? Obviously a single 2000 page .indd file isn’t going to work, and no sane person would even attempt it. I need a way to subdivide my book into section or topics. Something that can be reflected in the TOC.

It occurs to me that I may have the wrong idea about this setting. While watching various videos on using Indesign one presenter made a point of noting that these two options be unchecked, and I got the impression that Indesign was prone to randomly shuffling the documents for its own reasons. However while I’m posting this question it occurs to me that perhaps this option only means that “I” can shuffle the page as I wish. Generally speaking the word “Shuffle” brings to mind actions found on IPODs and other mp3 players. Not necessarily the ability for me to arrange the pages in my document.

Indesign already does enough screwball stuff without adding something like this to the list.