The BirdBrain's Nest

I'm ready to kill Microsoft Word right now. I have an assignment that needs to be typed out. The questions are in a Word doc, and I just need to fill my answers in between. Since I won't pay for Word, I am using an open source word processor called Abiword. For some reason (the tables in the .doc?), as I type stuff in, Abiword only puts one chararcter on the screen every 5 seconds or so. When I use the native file format, Abiword behaves normally. So something in that .doc is causing extreme slowdowns. That's just been the annoying part, my real frustration is that when I tried to open this document in Word on campus so that I can print it out, Word said my file was corrupted. And I even tried the "recover a corrupted file to get the text only" method. Still got the same error message. Is Word (and MS Office) so bloated and convoluted that it can't even extract ONLY TEXT from a "corrupted" document? And if Microsoft decided to rewrite Word (if they ever would), would it be available before Blackcomb comes out in 2010?

/me goes to download openoffice