Your answer was a little obscure What I did was locate the hidden word.qat file, opened the location and made a copy, leaving it there. Sure enough, when I quit Word next time, it forgot my added QATs. I therefore deleted the word.qat file, renamed the copy to word.qat - and Word opened with my stored QATs. Joy!
The next question is, why is Word 2007 forgetting my QATs? They are all related to a particular program. I ran the program through a repair routine, but it's made no difference.