It sounds like it might be a quirk of your computer, or the way Word is installed on your computer, that makes it impossible to open. You might try emailing the list to a friend that has Word, to see if he can open it, and if he can, have him save it again in a different format that you can open. In other words, after he opens it, he should do a "save as" and select a different format.

Here's another question for you: does your document contain any important formatting? Or is it the text only that you want, and you don't mind throwing away the formatting? I think there is an option, when you open a file with Word, that says "recover text from any file." IIRC, this appears on the list of file formats. You might try this and see what happens. (The laptop I'm using right now doesn't have Word, or I'd do a better job of checking this out for you.)