Microsoft plans to make some of the security improvements and features it built into Office 2007 available for Office 2003. Service Pack 3 for Office 2003 will be focused on security, said Joshua Edwards, a technical product manager for Office at Microsoft.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38915
It seems to me the application should display a message saying it could not open the file instead of crashing Word and leaving it up to the user to figure out the document is, not only bad, but the cause of Word crashing.