Help!

I had slowly put together macros that would take a tab delimited database
dump -- a list of names and codes and numbers -- off of our mainframe, and
turn it into a nicely formatted office phone directory.

I did this entirely with styles -- no direct formatting.  But I used
character styles that only changed font colors -- so I could find a unique
long string (containing for example a foreign city name and an eleven digit
number) and paint that green, then find a string of eleven green numbers and
break it up into four numbers, hyphen, three numbers, hyphen, four numbers.

This broke completely with Word 2002 --  Word 2002 creates a new named style
if I apply a character style that includes changing the font color of the
character.   So my subsequent searches don't find the characters, because
Word has changed their style name and my search doesn't know what they're now
called.

I suppose I should have used strikeouts or crawling ants or something
instead of colors.  Now, what to do ....???

Any suggestion welcome -- ideally some way to turn off this new feature in
Word 2002 and make it leave the style names the way I create them.

I'm not a macro expert; I did this slowly by guess and by gosh, got some
help from experts who aren't available now -- so I can't just rewrite the
whole macro.

Any help welcome.