Among the many poor UI decisions Microsoft made with Office 2003, the Reading Layout has to be one of the more annoying. Word has built in a whole bunch of tools to tweak layout and presentation, then they think that the handiest way to look at a file created with these tools is to default to a different view.
To fix this user-abuser feature, go to the Tools menu in Word, select the General tab, and deselect “Allow starting in Reading Layout”.
Another annoyance is the Favorites panel in Outlook 2003. I don’t get it. Were so many people not using that feature that they had to stick it in a place where it can’t be removed. Worse yet, they made it look like the view that is useful, which is Folders view. So if you already know where your stuff is and don’t need Microsoft to tell you you should have favorites (another semantic violation, as what is frequently used isn’t always a favorite), just use the Folders view (buried with those annoying icons at the bottom to make it look like an OS instead of an app).
Ah, I feel so much better having ranted against the Empire 