can't open Word attachments

I just upgraded my MacBook from 10.5.8 to 10.6 Snow Leopard. On the old system, when I would open e-mails in Juno web mail that had attachments, I would click on the attachment, it would download, open up in Microsoft 2004 Word:Mac, and display the document without difficulty. Since moving to 10.6, this is no longer working. Instead, when Word:Mac opens up, it goes to Project Gallery, which then displays a blank new document only. When I tell Word to ask me where to download the document (instead of just sending it to the Downloads folder in Finder), it skips the Project Gallery window, but still simply displays a blank new page. Also, if I look up the document in the Downloads folder, the image of the attached document appears in the right-hand box in miniature--I can see the font and the layout of the document--but when I double-click it there, once again, all I get is the blank page.

When I do the same with e-mails in Google mail, and choose Download instead of View, it will then open up Mac:Word, and then my Converter box comes up, already selected to Word 2008 documents, I click OK, then Word opens up the attached document just fine.

I suspect that the problem is that Snow Leopard is not running the documents automatically through the converter process, from the newer forms of Word, so that my Mac:Word 2004 can read them, so I just get a blank page. Has anyone had this problem and solved it? This is the only problem I've had since installing 10.6 Snow Leopard. (And, I did a reinstall and that didn't fix my problem.)

Mac Word 2004 and Office 2004 are now two versions out of date. You can go no further than Snow Leopard if you continue to use it. Update to at least Office 2008 and your problem should be resolved.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'm sure that you're right--eventually I'll have to update my Word program to a newer version. For now, someone steered me to the Project Gallery window, Customize tab, where I was able to change the "Open to:" setting from "New" to "Project." That took care of my problem.