I am going nuts trying to figure out how a previous author managed to
get his MS Equations to vertically align with the bottom of the text
(actually the equation number) on the same line.

I only seem to be able to create new equations that are aligned with
other text centrally in the vertical.

If I use the format painter to copy the bottom aligned format from one
of the previous author's equations to one of my centrally aligned ones,
it works fine. I have tried turning on reveal formatting in Word 2003
with no visible difference between the paragraphs, and the equation
objects seem to be both the same in terms of layout options (ie in
line).