>This morning I went to use Outlook's Help and one of the things it did all on its own was to overwrite my first writing of THIS MESSAGE as I went back to confirm steps that I had gone through to document my problem here@!#!@#

This might be an IE setting, not a Word issue. IE wants to reuse open windows, which means it does stuff like what you described. Here's how I fixed it on my machine:

- Open IE
- Go to Tools, Internet Options
- Click on the Advanced tab
- Uncheck the "Reuse windows for launching shortcuts" option
- Click OK to close the window