Microsoft Word Conditional Statements in Posts

When clients use the “paste from Word” feature in the TINYMCE gui, inline style tags are removed as expected but a ton of conditional information is left at the top of each post. For example:

<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> </xml><![endif]--><!-- --><!--[if gte mso 10]> <mce:style><! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} --> <!--[endif]-->

The irony is that this conditional Microsoft code works fine in Firefox 3 and I believe in Safari (at least on Windows machines) but causes the site to break completely in IE 7. IE 7 will display until it comes to the conditional markup and then stop.

I have urged my clients to use Firefox in the past, so they go for weeks before a reader using IE alerts them to the problem. Then it’s a mess going through each post to remove the conditional mark up.

Is there a way to make sure this conditional office mark up is removed when firefox users paste from MS Word into their posts in WordPress 2.6+?

This is a particularly nasty problem because clients hire me because they are not so web savvy. When this happens they lose confidence in WordPress because they don’t understand what’s going on with their sites. Plus, it seems strange that this conditional mark up is being left in the post by the “paste from Word” feature.

Thanks for your help.