Hi Julie

I had much the same Office 2003 problem as you describe (except Word would not open even in Safe mode, and in my case it did also affect Excel - which then did open in Safe mode).

I got the same "MS Word has stopped working" and "Windows will close Word and notify you if a solution is found" messages.

I tried finding an explanation using Google, which led me to your query but not to any solutions.

Word had been fine up until the last time I used it a few days ago, so I thought about what had happened since then. Seemed like the big event had been last week's Internet Explorer scare. Apart from stopping any use of Explorer, I also downloaded and activated Microsoft's initial better-than-nothing recommendation called EMET 3.0.

I won't try to explain what EMET does (as if I could) - if it does not ring a bell in your case then my solution is not going to be the same as you need.

Anyway, this EMET thing needed configuring, and given a choice among the Custom Settings of "Recommended Settings" or "Maximum Security Settings" I naturally chose Maximum Security.

And everything was fine until I needed to use Word earlier today and it would not open.

So, just to be trying something, I went back into EMET and changed those Custom Settings to "Recommended".

And Word opened just fine after that. No more problems.

Now, I am not remotely an expert and don't really have a clue what was going on (yeah, it just seemed a good idea to run strange software because Microsoft told me to). But on the off chance that your computer was similarly treated to a dose of Maximum Security strength EMET, you may find that reconfiguring it to "Recommended Settings" restores Word to normal operation.