Good call on creating a new account. That helps confirm it's nothing in the users account causing the problem.

The error you got from Console indicates Word is not even starting at all. So it's not a crash, it's a failure to launch issue.

"com.apple.launchd.peruser.501" is a user process, owned by user ID 501 (usually the first user ID on a Mac) that is responsible for launching any programs for the user. It's trying to start Word and failing. The numbers changing are a timestamp (I think), and a process ID (the 357) of trying to start the new process. Those aren't going to be relevant for any search results.

Exit code 1 though is a non 0 exit indicating a problem, but unfortunately not much to explain it.

There are a few possibilities I can think of:
- The app is damaged. Since nothing in Office is running, it's possibly a shared library (think DLL) with the damage.
- 3rd party security software may be causing a problem and blocking execution for some reason. I'd expect a log of such but no guarantees here.

Getting Office patched up may repair the damage. If you aren't seeing Microsoft Update around, you can download the patches manually. http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads - down at the bottom is a not so useful 2008 link. It's out of support, and last update seems to be 12.3.6. If you find Word in the Finder, and do a Get Info on it (Command-I or under the File menu in Finder), it should show the version they currently have.