A thought occurs to me, LR.
My hazy memory says that all these Word settings are stored in a file called "Normal.dot". I remember having all kinds of problems a while ago, and traced it to the fact that I had several different "Normal.dot" files in different places. One was the "master" that it used, and was where I had put it. That one was "write protected" for whatever reason, so whenever I made a change, it put a new copy in one of the standard places where MS keeps these things. Or something like that.
I remember rounding up all the errant normal.dots and deleting them. I put one copy in a place where I could find it easily (F:\Templates) and set all the options to what I wanted. Then I checked the template copy - unchanged. There was another new copy umpteen levels down in C:\ which I "moved" to F:\Templates. I changed the "default file location" again, and it's stayed there since then, and my settings have behaved.
That's with Office 2003. No doubt it's all different in Office 2013.
I did the same with Excel, with the same beneficial results.