Notes & MS Word - Data Does Not Show in Word

We have an application that has OLE automation between Notes and MS Word. This interaction between Notes & Word is successful for 99% of the time but it occassionally fails. The Word document is embedded in an rich text field in a Notes document. When the Notes document is opened then OLE starts and the rich text document is opened in Word. In this problem instance, the data is displayed in the rich text field in the Notes document but when the OLE object opens in Word no data is displayed. It is as if the connection between Notes and Word is broken.

Can anyone shed some light on what could be going wrong here and point me in the direction to fix this?