Office 2010, Appdata, Roaming user profile and Normal.dot

Question

Hello,
We have roaming profile on our domain users and they are working fine within the network.
When they are at home using the same computers, they login with a cached copy of their domain profile.
Server is 2008 R2, Windows 7 x64 clients and Office 2010 x64 package. 
When the users go home, they get "The file Normal.dot cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents" and "Word cannot open the existing file (Normal)" error when they open Word 2010. 
If they use VPN or connect remotely to the network, everything is fine. But when they are at home and just want to open a document from their USB stick, this happens.
The users Documents, Desktop, Favorites etc are mapped to DFS shares in the network.
This of course means, they don't have access to them at home, which is fine. 
On the ADM template for Office 2010, the User Template path is set to  : "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates"
AppData folders is redirected to localprofile for the above to work and under the "Exclude Directories in romaing profile" we have added the entire "AppData\Roaming" (we are testing so that is fine for now) but still the "Appdata\Roaming"
travels with the roaming profile which means the Template path becomes unavailable (or so it seems) when the users disconnect from the network.
But what is confusing is, I can still browse to the above path manually, but Word 2010 some how seems to think its not there. 
We do not want to use Offline feature (yet), and want to find if there is any other method of solving this. 
Ramu V Ramanan

Answer 1

Thanks Jeff. I don't want to go down that second path, autorecover is not our foe here, its the 'Templates folder' 
As for the first part, that doesn't work. The problem is word still looks for the path "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates" which it thinks is not
available, when it is (as its exempted from being roaming using the registry value/GPO). Moreover, when the user is disconnected from the network, they can't click Modify and change the path, it simply doesn't do anything when you click Modify on
the screen to change the path to the template file. 
We are considering ditching the roaming profiles, especially because the machines are now travelling outside the network. Or creating a special folder in all those machines where we can put a copy of the normal.dot. This is only affecting about 100 such
users, other users who have local profiles on the machines are fine.
Cheers,
Ramu
Ramu V Ramanan