Office is disabling other programs

Windows 2000 with SP 4 office 2003 SP1. The issue is that it keeps shutting
down other programs running in the background there are no error messages.
These programs that office is shutting down all have macros that you can use
with office. What happens is you can have both open like for example Acrobat
6 and Word you can use the PDF maker macro a couple of times but then all of
a sudden no error messages it just wont work and it wont even have the icon
on the toolbar i will have to go into the help menu, then to about office and
disabled items and sure enough there it is in the case of acrobat i cannot
even enable the program it just dosent work any more. But all the other ones
it will allow me to enable them and they work again. I was wondering if there
was a way to stop office from disabling these items either shutting down the
disable option or allowing a list of items that are frequently used.