DDE Error using word with outlook.

I recently applied SR-1 update to three of my workstations running Office 2000 (9.0.0.6627). I also applied Office sp3. After the update we started to receive the following error when trying to ‘reply’ to an email: DDE Server Window WINWORD.EXE -Application error. The instruction at ‘0x3030af6a” referenced memory at “0x00000000”. The memory could not be “read”. This error may or may not crash Outlook with it is received.

The error only occurs when using Word as our email editor with spell checker turned on.

I tried uninstalling Office on one machine and doing a fresh install, with SR-1, sp2, and sp3. But the results are the same.

This happens intermittently usually with the first ‘reply’ of the day and may happen again later or it may not. All machines are running NT 4.0 with SP6a.