Chances are quite good that it would work just fine if you run it
as administrator.
I really don't think there's anything in Office 2000 that shouldn't
work properly under Vista/Windows 7. That was the first Office
version that implemented proper security design, i.e., programs
folder didn't need to be writable in order to run, and this was
because Windows 2000 was the first version of Windows that gave only
read-only access to the Windows, programs and system drive root (c:\
in most cases).
Now this isn't a good option to perform on a regular
basis and rather inconvenient to distribute widely.
Now if you try running it as a user it might expect to update
certain portions of the registry or files such as MDAs in Program
Files which are updatable only by admin types.
Not at all likely for Office 2000.
So you might try to run it as a
user and see what messages you get and, possibly painfully, figure
out the answers.
OTOH it might work just fine. I don't know as I haven't tried it
yet. Also if you do install it as administrator and have troubles
running it as a regular user, try running A2000 once as
administrator so it can do some updates and then see if it runs
fine as a user.
So far as I can tell, all Vista/Windows 7 did was change the default
execution of programs (even when logged in under an adminstrative
logon) such that by default they got a user-level token. Nothing was
changed in the architecture of which parts of the registry and the
system drive were writable by user-level security tokens (though I
do know there were changes in the user profile permissions,
particularly writability of All Users\AppData). Thus, running under
Vista/Windows 7 would be like running under Windows 2000 or XP with
a user logon.
In short, except for the user profile issues, it's very unlikely
that Office 2000 should cause problems. The reason is because it was
correctly designed for the security environment that's been in place
since the release of Windows 2000, and that was implemented as no
longer optional in Vista (though you can turn off UAC and be back to
the insecure and dangerous defaults of running everything with an
administrative security token).