I am having a lot of trouble with the Caption function randomly renumbering
all of my figure captions.

I have tried the basic function:
Figure {STYLEREF 2 \s}-{SEQ Figure \* ARABIC \s 2} text.
But if I have to change the Outline indenture, which I do frequently on
large documents, the numbers don't match the paragraph anymore.  Or the
Heading level may change to something entirely arbitrary. I have tried to
manually reconfigure this by using something like:
Figure {REF _number \w\h}-{SEQ Figure \* ARABIC \r 3} text.  That appears to
solve the paragraph number but the SEQ number is not locking down.  The
document will arbitrarily change to something like:
Figure {REF _number \w\h}-{STYLREF 2\s}-{SEQ Figure \* ARABIC \s 2} which
forces me start all over.  I have tried to just suppres the automated figure
numbering and type in manually the numbers, but there does not appear to be a
way in Word 2003 to do that.  I have also tried using the \h command in the
SEQ field, but then the entire caption is missing from the Table of Figures.  
I have tried the CTRL-F11 command to force a lock. That feature does not
appear to have any effect on figure captions.

Is there any way to force a Caption to be dumb text only, but still be
recognized when creating a Table of Figures or Table of Tables?

There is no help on Microsoft.com that I can find that explains in detail
what the Caption command is doing, and what critical fields Word is looking
for to recognize the text for ToF use.

Or alternatively, to shut down the automatic renumbering and lock it in
using a field code other than SEQ for instance?