My recipients can't open any of my Word documents

[makaiman]

I am using Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and purposely save them in a
97-2003 format for my recipients. I had no problem last week and people could
open them up with no problem.

Now for some reason, NO ONE can open up these Word documents when I send
them as attachments. On my machine I can, but to my recipients, they can't,
and on top of that, they cannot even open up a .rtf version of the word
document. I am using Vista Ultimate and sort of freakin' out here. I can't do
a sys restore because I turned it off to save disk space and even if I do
turn it back on, i can't go back in time.

What is the problem? Are they accidently encrypted? Someone said on or one
of my automatic updates in Windows Update might be the problem, but I've got
to get these documents out to people and have them open it, and now, no one
can. This is nuts. I can open them on my own machine, but no one else can
when I send them as attachments.

Someone please help!, and thank you...

 

[Steve Yandl]

Have you asked any of them to try to save the Word file attachment to a
folder and then attempt to open it from there? I just find a lot of quirky
behaviors when files that are still attached to the email are opened,
particularly when there are version issues.

Steve

 

[makaiman]

Yes, I have and same problem exists, even when saved to a folder, my
documents, or whatever, their desktop. Same issue. They can't open them. It's
weird, because I can open them up on my machine (I'm the administrator), but
no one can when sent as an attachment, and guess what? I thought I'd just
copy and paste into an email the same document as a test, and all they see is
a bunch of funny looking characters, misplaced letters, etc... Most unusual
thing I've ever seen... Let me know your thoughts, and thank you...