word documents don't open from explorerbut will inside wor

That's amazing - What else could it be?!

I wonder if there's something wrong with the Office installation disc(s).

Wonder if the document itself is corrupted or a different version thats not understood ?

man I wish I knew what it could have been. I messed with it for a good 10 hours.... I completely uninstalled, reinstalled, upgraded from office 2002 (xp) to 2003, meaning it is HIGHLY unlikely that both installation disks were broken... I did a repair of windows (booted off the cd completely reinstalled over everything but didn't format drive) didn't fix it..... wiped the drive installed windows installed office, worked like a charm...

It could be a Windows update messing up the Word program. I've run across this problem before and it was that. But your problem may be different.

I had to find the latest update and delete and wait 4 weeks until they patched it then reinstall the update.

curious how uninstall reinstall didn't work though hmmmmmmmmm?