With three zero-day MS Word exploits in circulation, no Microsoft patches in sight, and no suggested workarounds from Microsoft, one workaround is to open incoming word documents in the sandbox. If you want to retain the information, just copy the text and paste it into a Notepad file out of the Sandbox. There are probably other options like opening a new word document outside of the sandbox and selecting paste special | unformatted text, but why take the risk.

If anyone knows that this will not work, please advise why.