Office 2010 ordinarily has no difficulty processing Microsoft Word 97 - 2003 documents. Your post suggests the document may have acquired some for of corruption. Corrupt documents can often be 'repaired' by inserting a new, empty, paragraph at the very end, copying everything except that new paragraph to a new document based on the same template (headers & footers may need to be copied separately), closing the old document and saving the new one over it.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]