I've made a template that seems to work nicely, but when I apply it to a
document, the styles in the document take on a life of their own. They do not
match the styles in the template.

Specifically, in the document to which I applied the template, some numbered
styles show up with bullets, some styles that had no bullets in the template
now mysteriously have bullets, and the indenting is wrong for many styles.

On both the template and the target document, the "Automatically Update
Document Styles" option is selected.

Most of the troublesome styles (but not all) are in a customized outline
numbered list. Could that be the problem?

Also, the document is fairly large (about 30 pages, lots of tables but very
few graphics). Could that be the problem?

As always, I remain grateful to the voices of experience who answer my
questions.