Couldn't publish speaker notes to Word

I had an interesting problem this morning where I couldn't publish speaker notes to Word. The publish process ran its course, and claimed success, but the result was the creation of a folder without a Word doc in it.

I read on the forum that this could be caused by the file name path being more than 100 characters. I found a different way this can happen...

I was copying and pasting text from a Word document into the notes section of PowerPoint, and I inadvertently copied a Page Break into the notes section. I have no clue why this makes a difference, but it prevents publishing to Word. Once the page break is deleted, publishing works as expected.