Haven't a clue what a "test admin account" is or anything else in that regard.
That out of the way, the problem is with Lion (10.7.1):
After spending close to an hour on the telephone with a Apple front-end agent and then more productively with a supervisor, it became obvious what the problem was/is, viz Library has purposely been "hidden" by Apple (because in OS 10.6 and earlier too many incompetent yutzes like me were mucking about with it and buggering things up).
You can go to Finder and select Go in the menu bar; you will not see Library. Push option key and it appears.
In OS 10.6 it'll show up in your home folder (but not in 10.7). It can be installed under Favorites in the side bar of the home folder, and then all is good.
Once that little bit of business was taken care of, changing the Word template Normal.dotm took about 7.5 seconds.
As they say in the Old Country (unnamed): Hot snot!
