Open office v3.0 is now available.
This is an open source (free) fully fledged Office Productivity suite. It is supposed to be compatible with MS office but I haven't had a chance to try it with Office 2003 or 2007 yet.
If you are building a budget machine for an older or younger person (not indoctrinated with MS office:D) this is a solution I would certainly recommend looking at.
I have just loaded it onto XP SP3 and it uninstalled and transferred settings from v2.4 automatically :)
I will do some compatibility testing and report back
Cheers
EDIT:
Link is here:
http://openoffice.3-suite.com/index....p_uk&se=google