using office xp documents in windows vista

[kazylady2]

I recently replaced my old laptop which ran Windows XP with a new one that
has Windows Vista. I installed my 2002 Office XP Professional program and
everything seemed to work fine. Suddenly every document I had saved opens in
an encrypted form only even though they have all been opening normally
previously. Two new documents that I just created a couple of days ago still
open as I created them. The first time the documents opened encrypted an
error message told me to reinstall the import decoder by reloading the
original Office disk, which I did and it said it installed successfully
however it did not fix the problem. Is the software just not going to be
compatible with Windows Vista forcing me to either upgrade or replace the
program or is there a way to fix the older version so that it will work in
Windows Vista?

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Office XP should work fine with Vista. What you're describing sounds more
like a virus. There are viruses that overwrite Word files, resulting in Word
no longer recognizing them as Word files. Once overwritten, there is NO
recovery of those files--I hope you have backup copies. The best you can
hope for is to stop the virus before it corrupts additional files.

Do you have antivirus software and is it up to date?

Word will not encrypt files without jumping through some hoops... it's very
difficult for it to happen by accident.