I don't know what it's called, so I don't know how to find help on it.
My documents have squiggles and stuff all through it and I don't want to see it. It makes it harder for me to proofread with it than without it. I actually got rid of it in the first part of a document (I think by turning off auto spell check) but when I continued adding more stuff to the doc, there it is again, and it won't go away!!

What I really need to know is how to save my normal.doc template with these markups turned off.

Sorry if this is unclear.

TOOLS > OPTIONS > SPELLING AND GRAMMAR

Uncheck the first three items in "spelling", and everything under "grammar".

Better?

Ok, weirdly enough, I unchecked everything under spelling and grammar options, and ALMOST all the markups went away. All that is left is several faint little purple dots under street names.

Well, I'm getting somewhere anyhow, thanks.

You could uninstall the whole shebang by doing a MODIFY install using the ADD/REMOVE PROGRAMS. When you modify the MS WORD install, you can remove the entire spell-checker portion of the program.