Wow, okay this is coming together now.  I can see exactly where I was
going wrong.  I actually switched from xsl:copy-of (then not knowing
the consequences) to creating the element, had some troubles with
local-name() but realized I was landing on text nodes (thinking this
is a common mistake in identity transformations like this) so created
the text() match template.
Yes I was confusing attributes and namespace declerations in the XML.  WOOPS!
I'm really not sure why I struggled so hard with this, you see, I was
a master of:

xml/rs:data/z:row  (back in the day...)

Thanks for all the help!

Karl..

On 8/2/07, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Ok, some progress, but I can't seem to get rid of the
> > attribute, xmlns:o.
>
> First, don't think of it as an attribute. It looks like an attribute in
> lexical XML, but XSLT doesn't see it that way. It's there because an element
> in your tree has a namespace node that binds the prefix o to the namespace
> urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office.
>
> There are four ways a namespace can find its way into your result document,
> and the way you prevent it depends on how it got there.
>
> (a) If you use a literal result element in the stylesheet then all
> namespaces declared in the stylesheet that are in scope for that element are
> copied to the result document. You can prevent this using
> exclude-result-prefixes.
>
> (b) If you use xsl:copy or xsl:copy-of to copy an element from the source
> document, then all its in-scope namespaces are copied from the source
> document. You can prevent this in XSLT 2.0 using copy-namespaces="no". In
> 1.0 the only remedy is to switch to using xsl:element.
>
> (c) If you create an element or attribute in the result tree, by any means,
> and the element or attribute name is in a namespace, then a namespace
> binding will automatically be created to ensure that this namespace is
> properly declared. There is no way of preventing this, because the document
> would be ill-formed if the namespace were not declared.
>
> (d) (Rare) You can also explicitly create or copy a namespace node using
> xsl:copy[-of] applied to a namespace node in the source document, or (in
> XSLT 2.0) xsl:namespace. If you don't want the namespace then remove the
> instruction that creates it...
>
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/