Changing Word document template location to a new server

[m131pao]

All of our standard letters/faxes/reports etc are based on templates. These templates have all resided on a set location on one of our servers for several years.

We have recently been moving all the data to a new server and have now taken the old machine off the network.

The problem we now have is that all the existing documents are still looking for their document templates in their original location (if we look at Tools... Templates & Add-Ins..., the Document Template is set to \\OldServerName\TemplatePath\TemplateName.dot). When this old server is not accessible, opening any of these documents causes Word to hang.

I thought I'd be clever and write some VBA code that walks through all the files (there are literally thousands) and rewrites the AttachedTemplate property to replace all the existing values, but Word reports that the documents' AttachedTemplate property is Normal.dot in all cases, and it won't let me amend it anyway.

Does anybody have any experience of solving a problem like this (we don't really want to keep the old server going just to serve templates to old documents)?

Thanks