PDFs Distilled from Quark Marred by Small Dots

[jddown]

Since the folks at Adobe couldn't help me, I thought I'd seek out the expertise around here. I've been distilling Quark files into PDFs, yet no matter how I adjust the Print Settings, small dots appear at various places in the document. They tend to occur near the end of text boxes, so that it often looks as if I've typed two periods instead of one (I can only delete the actual period). However, the little buggers don't pop up on every page, and don't show up when I print them out. Any idea as to what's happening or what I can do to remedy the situation?

thanks,
Jeff