I have come across some forums with similar problems but no one seems to have an answer that works for me.
I have office 2007 installed on my laptop and i am having a major problem with word and excel files appearing as corrupt or asking me to choose a file conversion type.

Initally i thought it was a problem with the USB key but the same thing happened when i emailed it to myself and tried to open it on a laptop with office 2003. Note that the files have been saved as 97-2003 compatable.

It also happend my friend with excel files when she saved them to an external harddrive and tried to open them on another machine. Both her laptop and the other machine have ofice 2007 installed.

I have tried to open the files with the open and repair function but the file still appears as random characters when opened.

I have also used programs like OfficeFix to repair the files but it dosnt work.

Please Help as i cannot access alot of important files because of this