I am pretty experienced using headers/footers but am having a frustrating problem

The normal template has appeared to have changed.  In a new document, the header heigth stays fixed at 5" (header top margin .5", page top margin at 1") which causes the page text to start at 5" down in the page (even though the margin says it is fixed at 1").  In header view, I have tried dragging/dropping the left ruler to change the header text margins but the header height stays fixed at a minimum of 5".

I have searched the Microsoft knowledge base and have tried many combinations of Page set-up header/footer and page margin settings - all to no avail

What am I doing wrong?  Thank you