Hi,
You may try to repair the installation of Office 2003, if the issue persists, you may start the computer in Clean Boot to determine whether the 3rd party application cause this.
Please follow the article in the link below.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/331796
Also, to use Process Monitor to monitor the winword32.exe process can exactly position the cause of your issue and know what kind of dll files invoked in this process.
Download Process Monitor at
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.
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