Opening & exporting Powerpoint - oddball artifacts?

[crh]

I have some java code that's opening Powerpoint docs and exporting all of the slides as images. It works fine, except that certain slidesets seem to contain artifacts. Here's an example (http://home.ptd.net/~crh3333/openoffice1.gif). Notice that little cartoon bubble in the upper right?

What's bothering me is that it appears when I open the doc in OpenOffice, not just as a result of the export process. When they appear, they're always GroupShape objects... generally containing two objects, but sometimes more. They're ever empty. I'd like to find a way to get around this programmatically, but it's going to be an automated process and I can't risk butchering other slidesets.

Has anyone else encountered something like this? What's Powerpoint doing that OpenOffice doesn't like? Any thoughts would be appreciated.


-C