I've seen a floppy drive and a DVD burner do it (though shamefully the floppy scenario took me days to figure out) any failing drive strung up to the same power lead as your OS volume can go this way.. rare as it is it does happen

Office 2007 runs perfectly on all of my customer's Ubuntu machines under Wine - even Outlook. Most people aren't power users... they just want FireFox for internet and Outlook for email. Printer support can be interesting though ;)