A quicker way?
When I get a document with runaway formatting I've found it to be faster to paste the document into a text editor, open a new document, and then paste the clean text into it. It's faster to apply new formatting in the clean document than try to find and fix everything in the old one. I've seen Word get stuck on some bad formatting and this is the only way to really get rid of it. I've also used OpenOffice to fix documents that Word couldn't fix.