So far with a few freeware applications, I am not able to recover the password and the only thing that actually worked is the decryption service (e.g. password removal) like http://www.officepasswordremover.com/
This made me think... how do they do it? I would love to write a PHP function to do this but no idea how they managed to decrypt a password-protected file in a matter of seconds and so easily!
For the moment, I am not too keen on spending £25 to allow me to open a word document.