It sounds as if the entire table is a single paragraph (lines ending in line
breaks rather than paragraph breaks). If that is not the case, see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/WholeDocumentReformatted.htm

To my way of thinking there is no such thing as a "tab stop table" - you
either have a *table* or you have a *tabular list* :-) May sound petty or
picky, but one of the main distinctions is what most likely is causing your
problem.

In a tabular list you need to press the Enter key instead of the Tab key at
the end of each line, so that each "row" constitutes a para. Otherwise you
have one continuous para, and [technically] tab stops are a para attribute.
That's why you're having trouble adjusting the stops. IOW, you've got one
long wrapping line comparable to a run-on sentence so you can't even get to
the settings beyond those for the first line. You might be able to "get
away" with something like this if all tab stops are equally spaced, but it's
literally impossible to vary the spacing with any degree of control.

In a table, the end of the line (para) is set for you based on the number of
columns, so you can just continue to press Tab to go from one row to the
next, but in a tabular list there are no defined rows & columns, so no end
of row markers.