I'm not saying it is correct or incorrect, simply that you have made
changes. When you do so, it is very important that you set the customization
context for your changes. You want them stored in your document or your
template, not in normal.dot.

If possible, construct your own template with your customizations and use
that template for new documents. This will give you a customized environment
for your documents without having any effect on the user's interface. Making
changes in normal.dot, even if you mark its saved property to true will
eventually cause real changes to normal.dot unless your application closes
Word when it finishes. This is because even though your changes won't
trigger a prompt to save normal.dot or be saved by your application, if the
user makes independent changes such as updating a style or recording a macro
after your application runs, when the users changes to normal are saved,
yours will be to. Commercial Add-Ins (including at least one from Microsoft)
have added multiple copies of menu commands to Word's menus because of this.

The article you reference also shows the method to create new documents
based on your own custom template. I suggest that you explore this. Build
your customizations into your template in advance, not a part of your code.

Again, you do not want to be opening a template. You want to be using the
documents.add method referencing your template instead.