Thanks a ton, KPS!! I followed your directions to the DL location in the X Prefs and, low and behold, the Word Processing folder in my Apps partition had been the default. Have no clue how that came about because I've never 'been there before'...
Anyway, changed it to the desktop and it seemed to be 'happy' with that choice. After all, there's a lot of space there! Can't believe that this was such a hassle but then I'm just getting used to Jaguar and its huge learning curve--too many 'layers'... [like Windows?]