well, there are a few ways to get rid of highlighted text without unlocking a doc, but none of them are very user-friendly, in my opinion! also all of these must be done per user- that is, i can't make any of the 3 following options a default in my locked template

1. in your Word options, you can change your "view" settings- just unselect "view highlighted text."

2. you can paste-special the highlighted text as "unformatted"

3. this is a weird one- you can use the find and replace tool to replace "highlight" with blank.

why Word has created this awful non-character, non-paragraph "characteristic" is beyond me. but i'm angry!

thanks for your response.