Just an update in case someone else has this issue...

I checked everything and anything including backups and recovered files, I had no luck finding the normal.dotm template I had been using. After having a couple of people familiar with Word and building blocks look at it we determined the only thing that could have happened was that the template (normal.dotm) I had been using had completely reset back to...nothing. Not sure if this was caused by the windows update, office update or some other issue. I ended up basically starting from scratch unfortunately.

Thanks again for the help Charles.