I belong to a Family History Group that uses several dfferent versions of Word. Generaly we use .pdf files since some do not have Word, however some still user earlier versions of Word. The Most recently I recieved a copy of one of our the members in.doc format, clicking that file it opend with a lot of garbage. I saved the file to a temp file, opend word 2007, located the file, clicked it, it opened fine.

Why did the file open with garbage when clicking it and open fine by opening Word first???? I suspect that the sender of this file was using Word2003 or maybe Word 2002 am not sure. I am opened Wordpad files before without any problems.

I did notice one thing, opening the file by clicking it, While viewing the file I clicked "file save as" then in that window I checked what file it wanted to save this garbage file as a .doc.text file. Very unusual.

HI! This could happen if your file association is for an earlier version of word or if the association is with word pad instead of Word 2007.

You can check this in Explorer under "Tools -> Folder option -> File types."

If this is not the case then use the Diagnostic tool in "Word options" there may be some corruption because you should have received an "Unknown format" error message or the like.

Paul