Word 2000, Word 2003 compatibility

The owner of my company has a Dell laptop with Windows XP Pro and MS Office 2003. Another user in the office has a desktop computer that has Windows 98 and MS Office 2000. When the user creates a MS Word 2000 document with tables and tries to send it to the owner who is using MS Word 2003, the owner can not open it. He gets an error message saying the file is corrupt. My short-term solution is to have the user send me the file, and then I open it in MS Word 97 and then save it again. I then send it to the owner who can now open the MS Word 97 version of the file. Is the something I can or should be doing to either the MS Office 2000 or the MS Office 2003 installation that would resolve this issue? Is there something that could be wrong with the tables in the MS Word 2000 documents that Word 97 can handle but Word 2003 can not?