Microsoft Office crashing on select accounts

[MattySaw]

Hi, I work for a computer lab at a university, we're having some problems with Microsoft Word for macs. First is with the setup assistant, on some accounts the setup assistant will continually crash and prevent word from starting, this sucks because the students need word to complete their work.
Another problem is that microsoft word is having trouble with autosave, when people try to save their documents, an error message appears saying that there was a save error and they don't have permission to save.
Both of these problems seem to be related to file permissions.
I've been fiddling with workgroup manager on the lab server for the past few hours and can't find a lifeline for this.
I've been given a deadline of a few days to solve this.
Thanks for any help.
More information can be provided as necessary

[SYNACK]

Is there a settings of prefs file floating around somewhere in the deploy that could be messing it?

[Tsonga]

Version numbers of OS X and office please