I've gotten behind on my posts here but this is worth recording. I don't know how many other people were having this problem but when I first searched for a solution I couldn't find one.
The problem I was having was that when I would try to view a document's Properties in Word or Excel 2007 I would get the error "Document information panel was unable to load".
It turns out that the problem is a missing DLL in one of Office's folders.
Thanks to Roman Hnatiuk for finding the solution. You can can read his fix here.
I also want to thank William Boyer for pointing me in the right direction when I couldn't find the answer.