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To me it sounds like a clean install is needed, but I really, really don't want to have to do that personally unless I have no other choice

Clean install of what? OS X or MS Office. I have reinstalled MS Office several times to fix one glitch or another. But that is to be expected. After all it is a Microsoft product.

Would it matter, what is why I asked

Reinstalling MS Office would take a small portion of the time required to reinstall OS X and chances are even if you reinstalled OS X you would still have to reinstall MS Office. I have had the best results using the Office uninstaller to completely remove Office first, then reinstalling it, and finally running the Office service pack updates (I started keeping them on a CD-RW so I didn't have to re-download every time). That always got Office back up and running.

For what it is worth, I have only reinstalled OS X once since I started using the public beta and that was when the boot drive on my wife's G4/733 went belly up and had to be replaced. There has never been a reason to reinstall due to OS or other software issues, and all my systems are completely stable and fully functional. I cannot say the same for OS 9 or any version of Microsoft Windows.

updated this morning, now excel does not shut down, entourage does not open (displays menu and that's it, same with powerpoint and word delivers a sheet one cannot type on. Is there any solution on the horizon for this mess?

the inablity of 10.3.9 to open any MS-office 2004 program can be seen in the terminal. Trying to open one of the programs displays: ## Component Manager: attempting to find symbols in a component alias of type (regR/carP/x!bt). That is the last thing that happens, then the program is stalled with an eternally rotating cursor. Does anyone have an idea about how to fix this?

now I did it. I reinstalled 10.3 from the original disk (not clean, but preserving all of my settings) and then gradually installed all of the updates offered by apples automatic update program. It needed some 3 passages, but now office 2004 works fine with 10.3.9. Also Safari and Quicktime 7 are working properly. One thing that came to my attention was that during the process of reinstalling the updates an icon of a roxio toast 6 document in the doc was changed (updated), so maybe that this program was causing the turmoil, but this is a rather very wild guess.