It was another bad day for Microsoft. A judge on Tuesday ordered the company to stop selling its popular Word document creation application in the United States. The ruling applies to Word's 2003 and 2007 versions, and takes effect in 60 days.

The decision is hardly final. Microsoft said it will appeal the ruling, however, the Judge Leonard Davis, of U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas, couldn't have been clearer. Davis said Microsoft "unlawfully infringed" on a patent that describes how programs go about "manipulating a document's content and architecture separately."

Davis ordered Microsoft to pay $240 million in damages to Toronto-based i4i, which holds the patent. He enjoined Microsoft from continuing to sell Microsoft Word, in its current form, in the U.S. Specifically, Davis said Microsoft can't sell versions of Word that can open documents saved in the .XML, .DOCX, or .DOCM formats that contain custom XML.

Talk about headaches--this is definitely a big one, at least for now.

For more on the Microsoft decision:
- check out this InformationWeek article