I've got this problem, too (on a 400 MHz Blue & White Rev. 1 G3 with 320 MB of RAM). I'd suggest sending in a crash report to Microsoft. Hopefully, this will ensure that whatever is causing this problem has been fixed by the time the real version comes out.
To do so, open up the Console application in the
Utilities folder, go to
Console->Preferences, and click the
Crashes tab. Check-mark the
Log crash information in ~/Library/Logs/.
Now, open Microsoft Word. After it crashes, go to the
Library folder inside your user folder, and the
Logs folder inside that. The e-mail address to send this log to is
mactopia@microsoft.com (and it would probably be good to give a description of what happened.)