Office 2003 users locked out by Microsoft rights management mess
Microsoft came clean about the problem in a blog post which reveals that "Starting on December 11, 2009, customers using Office 2003 will not be able to open Office 2003 documents protected with the Rights Management Service (RMS) or save Office 2003 documents protected with RMS".

It appears that users were faced with the following error message when attempting to open RMS protected documents using Office 2003:

"Unexpected error occurred. Please try again later or contact your system administrator"

It has taken a few days but I am informed that a hotfix is now available from Microsoft to unlock those frozen documents. Better late than never, I guess. And the cause of the problem, well you'll love this - an information rights management certificate had expired.
Which once again brings up the question when it comes to Office and Microsoft ... who owns your data? REALLY... still think it's YOU?

This applies to pretty much any Proprietary Software Application.