Well this morning I was set to write to Mike to say that it was a pleasure working on the translation of his great article at 'A List Apart' and Word refused to start :
Microsoft Word is set to be your e-mail editor. However, Word is unavailable, not installed, or is not the same version as Outlook. The Outlook e-mail editor will be used instead.
Google provided me with some links to Microsoft support and suggested re-installing Office ! Then I realised that a) Suse is just such a nicer experience all round, b) Microsoft often seems to take the long road to all solutions and c) my memory is getting bad since I had already come across this issue.
So I changed my Google query slightly and found my joy ?!
It's weird since I had also just downloaded and installed Nero 7 to try it out and after the thing crashed on me multiple times and left me with a half burned backup DVD (i.e. useless), I uninstalled it !
So when you get the above message you can either re-install Word as suggested by MS or just run this line of code in DOS :
Start > Run > Open (and type in the field the following code) : Regsvr32.exe %Windir%\System32\Ole32.dll
which saved me maybe an hour or more of uninstalling and reinstalling Office !