Anyone have any ideas for this.

I will try to give a brief background. I have an HP Pavillion Media Center PC. Overall its been pretty good. It came with a 60 day trial of MS Office 2003. And what an ordeal its been. First of all its a home PC and my use of any Office 2003 products here at home just isn't there. So, for along time I would decline starting the 60 day trial. It would periodically insist on trying to start anyway. In other words in doesn't ask it insists. If I try to set the default document processor I can't, it just gets reset to MS Word. MS Outlook doesn't work properly on my machine, so I refuse to use it. MS Outlook Express does and I try to use it. However, MS Outlook keeps changing whatever I choose for my default E-mail program back to itself. Again this hateful MS software doesn't ask, it just insists that I use it. And, since it doesn't work (all attempts to use MS Outlook bombout can't send email can't retrieve mail, etc., the experience is rapidly becoming one of I want to irradicate Office 2003 from my machine. There is no way I know of to contact Microsoft about this problem since all support must be paid for. Even complaints about what I consider to be clearly monopolistic practices on their part, they are not intersted in. And knowing the Bush Justice Department, they don't care either. So anyway is there a good replacement for Office 2003 especially, free or reasonably priced, and supported? And who should I complain to regarding the many blatant resets of my default settings in Windows XP pro back to Microsoft products?