OK, We received a document from a client in which they used change tracking and comments for revision control. However, for our needs this wasn’t necessary. In order to get Word to quit displaying markup and comments for the document we had to do the following:
1) On the Reviewing tab, click the Accept all changes.
2) Also on the reviewing tab, click the Delete all Comments.
Once this was done, the markup section of the window was gone and we could save it without the extra BS.