A quick search around Google reveals that there are many an application that will remove the protection from Word documents. However I question the trustworthiness of these programs, what if they install key loggers, or trojans, or some other nefarious code? So I did some research and scripting to make my own document cracker, and it was incredibly simple.
It’s a Powershell script, but I’m sure you smart people out there can make a neato interface for it with your Vb Script or C#, or even port it! You can get the source here.