And now they're all messed up. Boy I was doing so well as far as not making stupid mistakes on Pc for a long time. Guess I was overdue for a screw-up! I run Vista Home Basic x64 and I have about 20-30 Word 2003 document files.

I just through reformatting and loading windows, but it was before I installed Microsoft Office 2003 and I had to get a serial number from one of the document files. Of course, as you know, it's not a complete Microsoft Word document until I install Office 2003, so I opened it it Wordpad (ughh!). Anyway the wording was all messed up and there were all kinds of strange characters in there, but the information that I needed was in there.

So I closed the document, and of course, then the icon changed to wordpad or something strange. Anyway, I didn't think much of it. I've done that before, but when I installed Office, everything would automatically turn into an official word document and the word icon would show and all. But not this time.

This time I opened up the folder where I keep all of my word dcouments and all of them now have this strange icon showing and when I try to open them I get a message that says bla bla bla, is not a valid win32 application. But I didn't panic. I went into defaults and checked to see what was associated with .doc and it's the Microsoft Setup Bootstrapper (Not quite sure what that is)

Anyway I changed the default to Word, though the icon looked all weird. You know the type (see attached screenshot). So now I'm starting to worry. "What have I done, I say!"
Then I right clicked on one of those files and it said Word Document file, which doesn't make sense (see other attached screenshot). I mean if it's a Word .doc file, Word should open it right?

I even tried messing with the permissions, but wasn't able to get very far. The next thing I tried was to open up Microsoft Word and try to open the weirded out .doc file in there. To my amazement, the file opened up perfectly in Word and I thought... "I'm there, I solved it!" But after saving it under the same name, it was still listed in that folder with that weird icon and, like before, I couldn't open it.

So I tried saving it under a different name. Same thing happened and I couldn't open it in the folder of one of my directories in the other partition other than Windows that I keep them in. So this has got me stumped. So I don't know whether to make them all wordpad files and try to copy the information off those to fresh new Word documents or what!

Or maybe I should try uninstalling , then reinstalling Microsoft Office. I did try a repair installation but that didn't help. It seems like something is corrupted somewhere, or maybe it's a virus! Who knows!

Some expert help is definitely needed here!

First, something simple... right-click on one of these documents and select:

OPEN WITH > Choose Default Program
Or
CONTROL PANEL > Default Programs

Select Word 2003 as the way to open all .DOC files.

Reboot if necessary (shouldn't be) and then reopen your Text Documents folder. That any better?

Just a side tip... if you do not use all the power of a Word document, it's just text and such, don't use Word at all. Use Wordpad, or Notepad and save it as a normal .TXT document.

If you are too set in your ways to change, at least stop saving the documents as .DOC files, save them as .RTF (Rich Text Format) which is just a souped-up text format without all the additional bells and whistles and WordPad will have no problem opening/saving RTF files when called on to do so.