Hi Adam,
It seems that there have been a couple other instances of the same error occurring and the problem is a conflict that occurs with the Office 97 only. Somehow the MS Office type library has been modified and this is causing incompatibilities with MS Office 97. Have you installed any other application on top of MS Office that plugs into MS Office tools – Adobe Acrobat, Visio, Reflection?? If so, you will want to see about uninstalling or reinstalling those utilities and then reinstalling Office 97 to restore the original MS Office 97 type library.
Also, if you have a newer version of MS Office, I would highly recommend upgrading your computer. It seems that this problem is only with Office 97 and later versions of Office do not have this issue.
Thanks again for bringing this question up.
Kileen