IMHO, if stability is a requirement, stay away from office 2008. Even with the recent update, I find that Word 2008 (the office program i use most often) is quite unstable. I tend to make documents that have lots of tables and are quite long (hundreds of pages). I find there are frequent re-draw problems (text appearing on two different pages, then on no page, then finally in the right place, or text in footers being invisible while i'm editing it, etc.), randomly disappearing insertion cursors (that require killing word and restarting), and on two occasions it made my whole window start displaying crazy stuff (as if the graphic card was dying) and required a reboot. When I try to print a range of pages (as opposed to the entire document), embedded images disappear. When I paste an image twice into my document, the second or subsequent version eventually becomes corrupted.
Frankly, I find it to be a complete mess.
I used to use Office 2003 in VMWare fusion, and for awhile I rand that alongside office 2008, and the Office 2003/fusion solution was actually FASTER (and MUCH more stable and reliable). And office 2003/fusion actually works properly with Spaces (unlike office 2008, where windows and dialogs randomly jump from space to space). Office 2008 also puts things on the toolbox and makes them inaccessible from the menus or keyboard (for example, unlinking one header from previous headers), and makes other horrendous UI blunders.
FWIW I run on a santa rosa MBP 17".
