I had similar problems with Word and changed to Open Office (it's changed its name now to Apache I think). It is more intuitive and user friendly than MSW and not as complex, fewer bells and whistles that you won't need, and it's free.
A friend of mine who is totally computer illiterate, and who is also writing a book, changed to OO on my advice and is delighted with it.
If you have something already created in .doc format on MSW, OO will read it and convert it to .odt format, and the changes will be minimal unless you have really fancy formatting and in particular, indexing may not pull across correctly.
This may not help you in your case, but I thought it worth mentioning as it solved my problem and that of my friend.