Word constantly causing system to crash, please help!

WinME OS on a Dell Inspiron 400 Notebook. Whenever I attempt to open any Word document, the screen freezes. I CTL+ALT+DEL to attempt a restart and I get the BLUE SCREEN, followed by the message that the "system is dangerously low in resources" and Word closes... then it continues to close other applications thereafter, accompanied by the same "system is dangerously low in resources" message.

Can anyone help? I really need to use Word, and this thing insists on not letting me open a file.