just to close this out: the fix is to either save in the old format (.doc) or not use endnotes for referencing/bibliography, but to use Words bibliography tool. the bibliography tool inserts the references into the main body as a field, so it follows the body column format. I had only tried it once or twice in 2007, and it was so painful I went back to using the manual endnotes method. seems that's broken now for 2 col format documents.

I can only assume that 3rd party citation managers that connect to word don't run into this problem, as they likely insert citations in the main document body. Endnotes now always make their own section at the end of the section/doc, and columns are just going to balance.

After a lot of searching I was even able to stumble on an ASME format XSL that someone hacked together for bibword, even though it doesn't seem to have made it into their default style set:
https://bibword.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/patches

And new versions of Jabref can export to that XSL format well enough, once you know where the source and style files are hidden...

Who knows, maybe one of these versions will get reference management right...

thanks for all the pointers. sorry for derailing the thread