Thank you Genine, Susan and Jezebel--

I'm the point man for designing the VBA to handle the departmental/corporate
standards.
If Jezebel would help me appreciate why I should "dump the table idea" it
would improve my academic grasp of Word and VBA--surely there's a logical
technical explanation.
I'm enamoured of the table solution, using VBA code in two different macros
to set and reset the autofit feature. I'm still in need of a reason that
I've been unsucessful in taming the jumpiness of the footer--the cells seemt
to take on a life of their own.

Setting the table properties as shown below doesn't seem to address
anything. Should I set the table to be something less than 100% the width? Is
that what Word is trying to "fix" ?

SetFooterTableWidth Macro
' Set footer table to span margins, then reset to not auomatically reize.

ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.NextHeaderFooter
Selection.Tables(1).Select
Selection.Tables(1).AutoFitBehavior (wdAutoFitWindow)
Selection.Tables(1).Select
With Selection.Tables(1)
.TopPadding = InchesToPoints(0)
.BottomPadding = InchesToPoints(0)
.LeftPadding = InchesToPoints(0.08)
.RightPadding = InchesToPoints(0.08)
.Spacing = 0
.AllowPageBreaks = True
.AllowAutoFit = False
End With
With Selection.Cells(1)
.BottomPadding = InchesToPoints(0)
.FitText = False
End With
End Sub