You should never have more than one Normal.dot per user. This should be
stored in the appropriate location in each user's profile. Ordinarily,
Normal.dot is not refreshed at startup; if this is happening at your place
of employment, it may be caused by a login script of some kind. You should
take this up with the network administrator, as it is *not* the way Word is
designed to work. Normal.dot should not be shared among users and should be
used only as each individual user's scratchpad for customization. If your
employers want you to use a document with specific styles, it should be
created as a document template and placed in the workgroup templates folder.

You can have as many Normal.dots "on the machine" as you like. Word will
only use one.

Word will look in the location defined for User Templates under Tools >
Options > File Locations and if it doesn't find a normal.dot, it will create
one.

--
Enjoy,
Tony

Only Word can create a normal.dot. Naming a different template normal.dot is
not a good idea. Neither is sharing normal.dot.

See http://addbalance.com/word/movetotemplate.htm for step-by-step
instructions on moving / sharing / copying / backing-up customizations
including AutoText, AutoCorrect, keyboard assignments, toolbars, macros,
etc. Generally, you want to use document templates and put your styles in
them. See http://addbalance.com/word/stylesheet.htm for information on
sharing styles using a global.