<The question I have is this same problem also possible with either Abiword or Open Office?>
The word .doc file needs a proper environment (Microsoft Word) to survive and prosper. (Survive--if you open and re-save in another wordprocessor, you will kill the worm.) You should be able to avoid the problems by opening it with Abiword, OpenOffice, or WordPerfect.
This is indeed very ironic. We used to have to maintain a copy of MS Office in some machines so that we can ensure that the Office document can be properly read.
Now it has almost become imperative to remove MS Office so that our computers will not be infected with the cyber AIDS virus.
