I am using word 2007 on a laptop with 4gb of RAM, the error message i
get is:

Word cannot open this file because it is larger than 512megabytes.
(C:\Users\...\photographicportfolio.docx)

I have been able to recover the text so far but, have been still be
unable to open the file to see the pictures and tables.

--

Did you succeed?
Does OpenOffice have the same file siize limit?
oops- does OOo handle docx yet?

Using the 'open as zip' trick, you could probably just rip a few megs
of pic files out of the doc, to bring it under 512 MB.
Then open it with Word, and split it into sections.