Strange as it may sound, sometimes there are damaged .doc files that Word refuses to open, but OOo (OpenOffice.org - the full name for it) does open them, and saves them back sanely for Word to open them back.

Another one: have you ever tried to save, on MS Word 2000 a file for Word 95? It WONT save a legitimate Word 95 file, but an RTF one! On the other hand, OOo DOES save a real W95 file. Odd? Nah, just Microsoft.

Anyway, you have a point: because MS wont publish their file formats, there is no 100% MSO compliant converter. But OOo might be as good as it gets. Performance is a bit clumsy at times (specially if you have 64Mb- RAM), but other than that, I'm not sure I'd like to go back to MSO (if I ever go back to Windows from Linux, that is...)