Hello
I experienced the same problem with an NHMRC document; after the document opened and I clicked on the error message, Word crashed. I’ve got around it by opening Word first, then opening the document. Alternatively, if a colleague has a different version of Word etc, you can ask them to open it and save the file as an rtf, as this also seemed to work.
I’m using Word 14.0.02, a MacBook Pro, and Mac OS X 10.6.7