stripping line feeds from a text file in Word

This shouldn’t be tough, but I just can’t get it to work: I just want to strip line feeds from a Word txt document, but every time I take them out and replace them with carriage returns, the line feeds come back again.

For line feeds I’m searching for Unicode char 10 (00xA), and replacing them with either “return” or Unicode char 14 (00xD). but that replacement always seems to add a line feed again along with the carriage return. (Just stripping out the line feeds gets rid of all the line breaks; that’s why I’m trying to replace them with returns.)

Any ideas, folks? I’m using Macintosh Word 2008.

Model: iMac
AppleScript: 2.1.1
Browser: Safari 531.21.10
Operating System: Mac OS X (10.6)