I don't think the problem is so much a result of Word's export abilities, but ID's import abilities. ID is a large improvement over Pagemaker, which always choked on Word docs being placed. But it is still not a painless process, and if you have styles in Word with similar names to those in your ID doc, you WILL run into problems. I can only imagine that a newer version of Word would exacerbate problems, not make them less.
As jimoblak stated, and I agree 100%, your best bet may be to save the Word doc as an RTF file, and then place that into the ID document.
One other point, you said your template was corrupted. If you create a file, then save it, and use that as a template, changing info, deleting and adding, etc. then you could be causing corruption. If you have not, or are not already, create your template, and then save as a new doc every time you need a new doc, leaving the original file untouched for next tme. This will help guard against corruption.
When in doubt, deny all terms and defnitions.