I suspect that the file is normal.dot.

When the person told you to do it in Explorer, I suspect he meant Windows
Explorer, not Internet Explorer.

Do it from within Windows.

Open your My Documents folder.

You want to access Folder Options. This will be under the View menu or the
Tools menu depending on your operating system.

Change the options so that your computer does not hide hidden or system
files.

Change the options so that your computer displays the extensions for known
file types.

Then close the options dialog and the My Documents folder.

Open "My computer" and press the F3 key. Search for normal.dot. While it may
be in the folder you described, it could be anywhere.

Hope this helps,

This sounds like my advice :)

The file you are renaming is presumably normal.dot. That file is located in
a folder on your hard drive the location of which will vary according to
what operating system you are running.

The location of that file can be found from Word in the menu structure tools

You are confusing Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. It is Windows
Explorer that we are concerned with here. You'll find it amongst the
programs installed in Windows from the Windows Start Menu.

When you have it running, select its Tools > Folder Options > View
Amongst the list of options is one to show hidden files and folders - check
that.
There is another to Hide extensions for known file types - uncheck that.
OK your way out of there.
You can now search for normal.dot and when you find it, rename it to
oldnormal.dot

You can then reset the File display options back as you had them before or
leave them as it is more useful to know what is on your machine than to let
things happen unseen.

If Word has crashed, then you'll need to clear up the mess before you change
the display back - see
http://www.gmayor.com/what_to_do_when_word_crashes.htm

Thanks for all your willingness to help this week.  I'm
the guy having trouble with normal.dot
(god, it's come to this....)

I think I've followed the directions and I've renamed the
old "normal.dot" and now the path reads
c:\programfiles\microsoftoffice\templates
but it seems not to have changed anything.
And when I open I new doc I still don't get the setting I
saved when I saved them to the new "normal.doc" (i.e.,
margins, font size).  Is this all just an exercise in
futility?  I hate to be a pain but I think it seems I
- did find the normal.dot
- did rename it.
- saved it as a template (ps it is not check as a hidden
file at the bottom but so what)
and yet it doesn't seem to have done anything
That's as succint as I can be