will MS office 2003 work on a 64bit win7 PC

No. I didn't get all of Office 2003 to work until I installed Office 2003's Service Pack 3. Then it worked. This service pack is not to be confused with an OS service pack. Also, if your OS has some other Office installed, results are mixed. Maybe, maybe not if you have a demo version or other office installed. Hope this helps.

rproffitt...thanks for the reply. So, would these be the steps:

1] Install office 2003 and validate it.
2] Before running any of its programs, install office 2003 sp3

thanks

John, that's the method I use since our office bought a few OF2003 licenses and with MSFT issuing a patch to read DOCX we haven't updated in over a decade. Shameful maybe but call us cheap.

@johnruelle - yes that is exactly correct. My suggestion however, is to switch to LibreOffice... :-) Free, full-featured, and compatible with MS Office. They have done a LOT of work so that Office documents work correctly. That wasn't the case for OpenOffice and LibreOffice when it was forked from OpenOffice, but I have been very happy with it, especially the current versions. It won't cost you anything to check it out, and it won't interfere with you running MS Office either.