Courtesy of MikeM.
Joan

This sounds as if you may have a corrupted Word template.  Using
Explorer's
Search look for all instances of the file normal.dot and rename them
normal.bak and then retry opening Word.  If that solves the problem a new
defaults template file will automatically be recreated and you can delete
the
files you renamed.

For more details of this suggested fix see MS KB 307814 - "WD: Error
Message:
System Is Dangerously Low on Resources"
(http://support.Microsoft.com?kbid=307814).
--
Mike Maltby
mcmaltby@hotmail.com