You're still using Office XP - on Win XP?! Wow! That's ancient.

The file isn't so much lost as overwritten - by the "really dumb thing" you did. Your chances of recovering any of the original content is small to non-existent. A file recovery program might be able to recover some of the text from the file by examining your hard disk's contents. The only reliable way to recover your work is by restoring it from a known good backup (e.g. a copy on a USB stick, CD or floppy disk).

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]