Difficulty starting Word and emails in Outlook

[DDL]

I have Office 2003 Professional and recently I have trouble opening up every
Word file (and it is affecting email in Outlook). Something seems corrupted.
I have run Detect and Repair in both Word and Outlook, but to no avail.

I have difficulty opening up every document, and can no longer have 2 Word
documents open at the same time. It takes forever to open/close documents,
and the same thing with email. Often I will get some message upon closing of
Word about the normal template being changed. I don't know what that means,
but I usually hit cancel.

I also have Adobe Acrobat installed on my PC, if that makes any difference.

Are there any ideas about how to fix? This is extremely frustrating.

Thanks in advance...