It's possible your new system has slightly different versions than your original one — I cannot think of another reason ID would think a font is different, even if the name is the same.

If so, you can safely (almost) use the Find Font dialog to replace the old with the new ones. It's almost safe, because another version of the same font may have different characters (although usually more rather than less), different kerning (again — usually better than worse), and perhaps even different OTF features.

(I was going to say those small difference might cause your text to re-flow, but then I realised you are upgrading documents from CS2 to CS4 — the paragraph composer also was improved in CS4, so your text most likely will re-flow. Fortunately, it's only to get a better spacing.)

It's possible your new system has slightly different versions than your original one — I cannot think of another reason ID would think a font is different, even if the name is the same.

If so, you can safely (almost) use the Find Font dialog to replace the old with the new ones. It's almost safe, because another version of the same font may have different characters (although usually more rather than less), different kerning (again — usually better than worse), and perhaps even different OTF features.

(I was going to say those small difference might cause your text to re-flow, but then I realised you are upgrading documents from CS2 to CS4 — the paragraph composer also was improved in CS4, so your text most likely will re-flow. Fortunately, it's only to get a better spacing.)

You might want to investigate other programs that have specifically been written to create HTML.

It's possible to export to XHTML from an InDesign document, but you will loose all advanced formatting, and you will have to manually fill in every style in the CSS. InDesign has not been designed with HMTL output in mind; it's more the other way around, it provides a way to get your text into XHTML if you really, really need it to.

Oh absolutely. The magic GREP code to search for one out of a set of characters is [this] — every single character between the square brackets. [this], for example, will find either a single 't', 'h', 'i', or 's', and [that] will find a single 't', 'h', or 'a' (the duplicate 't' is ignored).

This GREP search will find either a straight single quote or a single curly one, and only when preceded by a digit:

(?<=\d)[~'~]]

and you can find its twinned brothers using

(?<=\d)[~”~}]

Anchorage, Alaska! According to Michelle Shocked, “you are in the biggest state of the union”!

Do you only get those permission errors from within InDesign, or does it not work with any file operation? “Mapping” the drive, does that mean you are working on Windows, and tried to map it to a drive name like “Z:”?

A Table of Contents story gets a special 'tag' from InDesign, so it knows what it can throw away when replacing the old one. It sounds like this got messed up somewhere.

Is your entire contents a story of its own? (I.e., not linked through with the rest of your document?)

If so, can you check if it goes back to work if you create a new table of contents, place it alongside your pages, then cut-n-paste the newly generated text over the old contents?

Lee, if you can't educate your copywriters, there is not a lot you can do up front. Either disable automatic quotes and expect straight ones in your plain text, or enable them and you have to check every inch and foot mark (as well as minutes and seconds, by the way).

I think you're best off with enabling them, because you can use a GREP search to look for digit-then-curly-quote — the most common case where you want to change them. The opposite, checking which straight quotes to change to curlies, is a bit more difficult.

You can search for this, using GREP Find: for single quotes,

(?<=d)~]

and for double quotes,

(?<=d)~}

You can replace them with straight quotes from your text font (use the code ~' — that's a tilde, followed by a single straight quote, for feet, or ~” — tilde, straight double quotes for inch).

If you are inclined to typographically correctness, follow David's advice and insert the actual Symbol symbols. For these, you should replace with either x{2032} (single) or x{2033} (double), and don't forget to set the font to Symbol in the Replace With formatting field. (I lean towards ridiculous correctness and always create a character style containing just “Symbol”, especially for things like these.)

Whatever you change it to: do not hit the Replace All button straight away! Use “Change/Find Next” until you are fairly sure your document does not contain a phrase such as

“How old are you my child?” “I am 5″, answered Mary.

(It gets a bit difficult when that question is, “How tall are you my child?” Then you'd need some more context.)