OK; got my IT guy to make the registry change and it may have helped somewhat. What I've discovered is still or the real problem with linking tables from Excel to Word using "keep source formatting" is any formatting to the numbers in tables, be it comma for thousands or a $ sign will create some sort of wrapping of the column and increase the height. If you use numbers without any accounting format, it works fine.

Edit: Actually it appears than you can format using "Number" or "Currency" format but any "Accounting" format blows up the table formatting in Word.