Okay, I've done a lot of poking around and finally figured it out on my own (with a little help from the internet).

The girl I got from Microsoft was useless. Kept blaming my software. I told her when I figured what was wrong I was going to contact her and tell her what it was.

I knew it must have been a formatting/styles issue, so based on that I clicked on Style Inspector and it became very clear where my problem lay. Seems my paragraph formatting was Normal, but text level formatting was italicized. Not sure how or why that happened. not sure how I fixed it either, but I just fiddled around on it for five minutes and got it back to normal.

Sometimes Microsoft is great, but sometimes they just completely waste your time. Shouldn't these people be properly trained in Word before getting jobs trying to fix problems with it?