Office 2003 Track Changes

We are about to migrate to Office 2003, but having placed this in a test environment have come up with a potentially big problem in Word. If a document is password protected inside the document that has been created in Word 2000, when you open it in Word 2003 it shows all the track changes and these cannot be turned off unless you know what the password is to unprotect the document. My problem is that I do not know why these protections were created as you can edit the document, and the user that created these passwords has left the company so we do not know what the passwords are. Does anyone know of a way to get around this problem without having to use a password cracker.

Thanks