Cannot view contents or change Word 2003 normal.dot file

I'm running win10 Pro on two Dell T3500's

I use Word 2003 and have some minor problems which I hope will be fixed by renaming my normal.doc and restarting Word so I have the default setup. Word 2003 uses normal.dot; dotm was introduced on later versions.

I used %appdata%/Microsoft/templates to reach normal.dot

I have two problems:
Normal.dot is empty, even though I right-click on the file to open it.

I cannot rename normal.dot, because I'm told the file is open. The ~162 byte $normal.dot file is there. I can delete it and rename, but still have an empty file after restarting.

Maybe my problems cannot be fixed with a restore; problems are:

Links are not in blue and underlined.

View>Header and Footer does not provide the header and footer window.

Jim

Thanks, Ken and the first person who answered me. I cannot find the original answer, and think I was moved from General Support to this forum, Microsoft Office and 365, and lost the thread.

My two computers have different problems. Computer "A" doesn't list links underlined with blue letters. I think I was able to use the default normal.dot by renaming the existing file and restarting Word. The problem remained.

Computer "B" has the header and footer issue and the ~162 byte $normal.dot file problem, so I cannot save and rename normal.dot.

Both work ok otherwise, and I see there are no easy solutions. I think I'll stop for now, and reinstall Word 2003 sometime in the future. I notice there are many other 2003 threads, some even saying 2003 doesn't work with current win10 versions. I'll read them and maybe get some ideas.
Jim

Thanks for the tip on Libre Office. I'll check it further.
I purchased Office 2010 years ago, and installed it on my notebook. Word 2010 initially turned me off, with the ribbon and many undesired default features, such as double spacing, a default font I didn't care for, etc. A more serious fault was having both doc and docx files, since I have thousands of doc files on my desktop. I looked into some of these issues (plus coming up to speed with the ribbon), and think they can be resolvable. I really like the search function in Word 2010. I'm having big malware issues on my desktop, and am seriously thinking of starting fresh on a different hard drive, in which case seeing if my Office 2010 disks can be used again. It is easy to switch between different drives.

Jim

Delete all version of the file it will recreated to default when you open word