I think I figured it out. If you go to Font Book and look at the following fonts

• Andale Mono
• Arial
• Arial Black
• Arial Narrow
• Arial Rounded Bold
• Brush Script.ttf
• Comic Sans MS
• Georgia
• Impact
• Tahoma
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana
• Wingdings 2
• Wingdings 3

When Snow Leopard was installed, or from what I understand, it installs new versions of these fonts. If you hover the mouse over the duplicate fonts in Font Book, it tells you what version the font is. Delete the older version of the fonts and restart word. The problem went away for me.

Let me know if this works.