Cannot open a Word Document unless I End Process.

My boss is having a issue where Outlook is open and he cannot open any word documents. It doesn’t matter if its an attachment, on the shared drive, or on his local PC.

In order to correct the issue (temporarily) I have to close Outlook and “end process” on winword.exe.

Does anyone know what is causing this? or how it can be permanently corrected.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

PC has:
Windows XP SP3
MS Office 2003
4GB of RAM