I just found out about PureText, a very nice (and free) little utility for scrubbing formatting info from data on the Windows clipboard. Basically, it lets you add "Paste Special/Plain Text" to any Windows application. Fantastic - I've been looking for something like this for a while.
Now I can go back and disable Word as my email editor for Outlook 2003. I was annoyed that they disabled the "Paste Special" option unless you use Word as your editor. Now I'm free of that constraint. Woo hoo!