I didn't have time to check the search results but it looked as if plenty of people have that problem with images and graphics.
It's not unlikely that there's no solution. As a workaround you could get OpenOffice which is able to read and write Word2003 docs. I've recently heard that somebody who had the latest word version wasn't able to open his oldest Word files from eons ago. He was able to open them with OOffice, though.