Hey, everyone check out http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/docs/MSWordView.html if 
you haven't seen it already.  It's a GPL'ed program that converts MSWord 8 
files.  Please, let's not duplicate this effort in KOffice unproductively.  
It's written in C, so maybe some KDE object wrappers around the main logic 
functions would allow it to be cleanly merged with KWord stuff?
--JZ