  The cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies have turned out to
represent one of the most stringent 'bottle necks' for scenarios of large scale
structure formation. As a possibility to relax this constraint, it has been
proposed that early reionization can damp CMB fluctuations on small scales due
to photon diffusion in the ionized plasma. As an example, I investigate the
recently proposed scenario with cold dark matter (CDM) and texture seeds.
There, an analysis of CMB anisotropies shows that early reionization is a
crucial ingredient for this scenario. Without damping, the small scale
anisotropies would dominate and exceed observed limits. In this paper I present
analytical and numerical results for the amount of damping due to early
reionization for CMB perturbations induced by a collapsing texture.
Furthermore, the spectral distortion of the CMB due to Compton scattering of
the hotter plasma electrons is calculated. Next I discuss the physical
processes which lead to a system of coupled ordinary differential equations for
the degree of ionization, the electron temperature and the evolution of the
ionizing radiation.
