Apologies for the delayed reply--
@Macropod: My colleague cannot delete the spurious paragraph marker. It will not allow him to put his cursor on it.
@Guessed: Whether there are one, two, or three footnotes on the page, the extra line space (paragraph marker) appears only after the last footnote on the page.

Regarding the Mac version of word: The file opens normally in the Mac version of word on my colleague's Imac. There are no extra spaces, no unwanted paragraph markers. It appears as it should, just as the same file appears in my computer. And the same file when my colleague opens it in his MS Word on Parallels, then in the 150 page document, on six or seven pages this unwanted extra space appears in between last footnote of the page and footer beneath it. As a result, 2 or 3 lines of text are pushed to the next page with the result that there are more lines of text on the final page of the chapter. And if the last page of the chapter is filled, then it adds an extra page to accommodate the extra 2-3 lines.