"my Win 98 system now refuses to read most "MS-Doc" files "

These are only the NEW ones - straight off the web - probably XP or Vista stuff... the OLD ones saved work just fine. I don't have any NEW Word - my version of Word came with Win95 - and I unloaded it some time ago.

I grew up on Hex Editors... patching TRS80 files hot on the floppy...