leenia -

If your visit to the Office site produced very large text displays, and especially if your computer is "talking to you," and reading screen text, someone may have turned on one or more of the "accessibility aids" in your new WinXP. Once these options are turned on, there are numerous "Quick Keys" for turning strange things on/off that could be used inadvertently.

Start|Help, select "Index" at the top, type "Accessibility" in the search box, and hit Enter or click Display for some info on these options. (For detailed info, you may have to consult the Microsoft Knowledge Base for specialized info.)

You may also just need to adjust settings in your browser. If you happen to be using Internet Explorer, the next time the oversized type appears, try clicking "View" on the top bar, select "Text Size" and set it to a medium or smaller size.

It has taken 14 posts to reveal unambiguously that the original files were composed and saved in WordPad and that you're using classic view in WinXP Home.

We do not yet know what file extension(s) appear(s) on the file your are trying to open.

We do not yet know what browser you are using.

We do finally know that you do not have Word installed on your new computer.

We suspect, but do not know (for sure) that you never had Word installed on your Win98 computer, which might have indicated that someone had opened your file in Word 6. Or whether you (or someone) might have opened the file on another machine and brought it back.

When an "imported" file of any foreign (not Word) type is closed, most recent Word programs will ask if you want to save as a Word document. A careless "Yes" could have copied your file to Word 6 (or some other Word) format. This normally would produce a separate file with a .doc extension and would have left the original .rtf file intact; but your tech may have recovered the Word version for you.

The question is whether it is possible that someone may have saved a .doc version of your file, and your tech recovered it instead of your original WordPad version. If your tech hooked your hard drive up to his own machine for data recovery, he might have opened the file to verify it, and accidentally converted it to Word format.

Post #14 finally suggested that you prefer to use WordPad on your "new" machine. We do not know what other programs you have installed to work with, if any.

I'll repeat: WordPad is a text editor. The default format in which WordPad saves files is as .rtf files, which is a "Rich Text File" using a few "non-printable" ASCII/ANSI characters to define a minimalist amount of formatting for the text.

NotePad is also a text editor, but lacks the ability to respond to the non-printing characters that WordPad can use, so it may - when it can open an rtf file - just show them as "splats" indicating unidentified characters. (Usually unidentifed characters are shown as open rectangles, but loading a different font for Notepad may give some other "default unknown" character.)

A file saved from WordPad on a typical WinXP machine will have a "Word" icon, indicating only that it contains both text and formatting. This may vary if you don't have Word installed. Your preferences (file associations) in WinXP can tell your machine to open an rtf file in WordPad or in Word.

The only default use WinXP makes of WordPad is for opening .txt files that are too large for NotePad. Normal setups often will send .rtf files to Word, if Word is installed, although this may vary with user prefs. With default settings, WordPad does not even appear on the WinXP Start menu, since it's used only for large .txt files.

WinXP does not necessarily use either the icon associated with a file or the file extension (the .rtf) to determine what kind of file it is and what program to use to open it. Usually the file extension is used, but if there's any ambiguity, WinXP can look "inside the file" and decide that it's a different kind.

Since you don't have any version of Word installed on your new machine, the input/output filters described previously will not help. At the same site, however, you should be able to find a "Word Reader" that will allow you to open and read Word documents without having the actual Word program. You cannot edit or save a document with the reader, and I don't recall whether it permits you to print one.

It would be helpful to those trying to give aid to know what file extension appears on the recovered file, so we can at least guess at what format the file may actually have been saved as.

Note that "archaic practice" to which some techies may still adhere was always to change the file extensions of recovered files to avoid overwriting them during "rehab" efforts later. The associated practice was to make a copy of the recovered file and change the extension on the copy back to the original before attempting to open the copy.

Note also that it is entirely possible that the recovered file was corrupted in some way, either during the failure of your computer or in recovery.

As "last resort" I'll dredge up ancient DOS knowledge that almost any file can be cleanly converted to a text file that can be opened in NotePad or WordPad with the simple command in a DOS/COMMAND window:

TYPE filename.xxx > newfilename.txt

For filename.xxx you use the existing file name of your "mystery file."

The > "redirects" the output of the "TYPE" command into the file "newfilename.txt" which will be openable (nearly always) as a text file. For most original file types you will find a whole bunch of "unident" characters, but all printable characters should appear reasonably in order.

The TYPE command simply goes through the file and sends one character at a time to your monitor. By using the "redirect" (>) you send it to a file instead. "Unprintables" are given a default "character" that's the same for all, so they're easily deleted from the resulting file, leaving only printable characters.

I can't guarantee this method will always work, since the Command replacement for DOS is a bit changed: but it always used to work and a trial conversion of a small Word .doc looked usable.

John