>I would just put the templates on a network shared folder with most rights removed
I think that is the answer. I guess if I'd stated the problem clearly enough at the beginning, I could have saved everyone a lot of time :-) There is still the occasional problem with corruption but I think that would go away if access was restricted.

> You could build the template documents into the exe
I was working on that but am having trouble getting them out! Also, is there a way to add extra categories in the Other tab of the project? it's hard to find them when comingled with everthing else. Perhaps a table would work best after all....

>You could copy a template to a user-specific folder
I like that idea, especially if I could remove Save As from the Word menu somehow. There is a specific naming convention for these documents that the application needs to control.