How to see top/bottom margins in Print Layout view?

Option 1: move the mouse pointer to the top of the page until it changes to  then click.

Option 2: select Tools > Options..., and in the View tab, tick the check box 'White space between pages', then click OK.

The recreation of Normal.dot is what Word usually does. The one thus created is the same as if you had just instealled Word - no macros, customisations, etc. The presence of a Normal.dotm file suggests you've had a later version of Office installed.

Repairing Office, though it might not help, will eliminate that as a possible source of the problem. If you have had a later version of Office installed, that's an even greater reason for repairing Office 2003.

The other possibility with your errant document is that it has some forma of corruption. Corrupt documents can often be 'repaired' by inserting a new, empty, paragraph at the very end, copying everything except that new paragraph to a new document based on the same template (headers & footers may need to be copied separately), closing the old document and saving the new one over it.