Whats with Wordpad?

[guitar11]

I've had my operating system upgraded from Windows '98 to XP (home edition). There is a folder of "transferred data" which contains all my previous information, including scads of *.doc files, all of which were created on Wordpad, the only word processsing program I ever used. When I try now, with wordpad on XP to open any of them, I get a message saying "cannot load Word for Windows 6.0 files". Wordpad is supposedly the default program specified to load *.doc files, yet I get this message. The only info I've been able to find at microsoft in regard to this error message has to do with encountering this problem in conjunction with a Quicken program, but that has nothing to do wth my situation. All I am trying to do is use wordpad to access wordpad documents- seems like it shouldn't be too much to ask. Anybody know why this is happening? Thanks. -J