what i have to say may not help any in the short term, but it will help a lot in the long term.
Firstly, i have never had this problem, and whenever i have deleted a word temp file (assuming that the actual document is saved and so on properly, and i usually copy the finished document somewhere else as well) there is no change to the actual document.
Secondly, consider getting AbiWord from
http://www.abisource.com/download/ and also consider getting OpenOffice from
http://www.openoffice.org/both of these releases emulates word 2002 almost seamlessly, although AbiWord does not save as .doc, it saves as .rtf, which is safer anyway since a macro virus cannot then be attached to your document. OpenOffice does do .doc files though, and both apps can open and edit word documents (and wordperfect documents and a bunch of others) no problem. Also they have both just been ported to run on MacOSX too, which is always nice.
You can uninstall M$ office, and install those applications with virtually no fear that your files will become incompatible. They are both free office suites and they come with full documentation (as files) (which can also be got online seperately), and you will find that they take up less space when installed than an installation of M$ office does.