trying to work around Word corrupt file

I'm finishing a ten page proposal without any fancy formatting. I think it's corrupt: first, two long lines, like underlines appeared, wouldn't go away. I had to copy and paste the whole document into a new one and retype the lines above and below to avoid those lines from coming to the new document. Saved with new name. Success.

I'm on the last page and the top margin is set correctly, but the type begins about four inches down. Nothing has worked to remove it: changing margins, creating new section, copy and pasting, re-typing. The closest I came was copy and pasting a paragraph from the page before and pasting it at that same spot, ten lines before the bottom of the page. What happened was the extra space got smaller and smaller with each paste. However, when I typed the last paragraph in the right spot and then deleted the extra lines, the space came back.

I've spent hours on this problem.
Thanks for your help.

I'm using Word 11 for Mac and OSX 10.8.2

I use MS Word at work but am not by any means an expert. One of the things I really liked about Word Perfect was the 'Reveal Codes' command, which let you easily spot the embedded code that was causing problems.
I have heard there is a similar feature in MS Word though I have never used it, nor do I know how to access it. Try googling Reveal Codes and MS Word (or looking in the Help file) alternately, you might try opening the document in Libre Office or Pages then exporting as an MS Word file after fixing the format problem.

Hope any of this helps,
RavingMac

EDIT: Apparently if you do Options>View and select Reveal Formatting, if will give some of the same function as Reveal Codes did in Word Perfect

Yes, I loved Word Perfect and wish it were still around. No, no good reveal codes views as far as I can tell.

one more weird thing

I just noticed that the last page has the footer that's on the first page. it's only supposed to be on page 1. can't get rid of it without deleting first page footer. never had this problem before.

Sorry I couldn't help more. Let us know how it turns out.