[grammatim[_2_]]

It's quite usual for a journal article or book chapter to have an
initial unnumbered footnote containing acknowledgments.

Is there any way to do that in Word2003?

I tried starting footnote numbering with 0 (which I could subseqently
color White or mark Hidden), but the start number must be between 1
and 64K+. (Which suggests, incidentally, that there's a limit to the
number of footnotes a document can have.)

I tried inserting a Continuous Section Break (so as to restart
footnote numbering in the second section), but if the first section
contains a footnote, the second section starts a new page.