To truncate a file so that it is zero bytes, do the following:

truncate -s 0 filename

It doesn’t work. I’m not sure why. The problem is reproducible for me by taking an e-mail message from within Mail and pasting its contents into a blank Microsoft Word document. Word will freeze with a “beach ball of death”. At this point, you must force quit the application.

Things that don’t appear to make a difference:

• Running Disk Utility.
• Safe mode. Yes, it still crashes in safe mode.
• Removing Microsoft Office 2008 and re-installing it.
• Removing all Microsoft preferences. You can do this by deleting all com.microsoft.* files under Users, Home, Library, Preferences.
• Select duplicated fonts and resolve duplicates in Font Book. This didn’t seem to do anything useful, so I additionally validated fonts and removed all the non-TTF duplicate fonts.

Things that worked, though I don’t know why:

• I ran at OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard setup again from the DVD. This fixed the copy and paste issue.

Finally, here’s the crash report. Some additional advice can be found here, though most of it has been useless.

I also find it somewhat hilarious that Mac users rely on complete Voodoo magic when attempting to solve problems.