I second open office a a good free word processor.
At one point in time Wordperfect was the best word processor on the market. But then they went through some ownership changes, and stagnated, while Word kept getting better.
As much as I used to like Wordperfect, Word has become the standard today, and open office is a pretty good Word clone.
The Major turning point was that the first stable version of wordperfect for windows came nearly a year after Word for windows 2.0. (5.1 was released rather soon after Winword 2 but you had to install it from DOS and it had all sorts of messy stability issues, too). They just never caught up after that. I imagine that whoever was in charge of it at the time was banking that windows wasn't any different then, say, Desqview or any number of shell programs, and that developing a program exclusively for it was sort of a waste of resources (at the time this was not an unreasonable assertion, really). They just got unlucky, and they never caught up, especially because of the ownership changes, which basically took off little bits of the product with every ownership change ("we'll sell all of it, except for this component" type of stuff).
Basically, they were a year late with a Windows version, nine months late with a 32-bit version, and a year and a half late with a version that worked on NT, and even these late versions were all extremely buggy compared to the MS Office releases they were supposed to compete with. In many ways it's more a casualty of the DOS->Windows migration whose corpse is still being passed around. I don't think it was ever "the" word processor. when I think of old word processors whose various shortcuts got so ingrained in peoples skulls despite them being completely non mnemonic (wordstar diamond, anybody), I think of Wordstar, which was the undisputed champion for a very long time.
Anyway, I have to agree with the OpenOffice recommendations.