Two solutions:
Download Open Office from: http://www.openoffice.org/
It can read Word, Power Point and Excel files, it's free, and it's a
much better editor than Wordpad.
Change the file association. Right-click one of the Wordpad files,
select "Open With", select wordpad , check the box "Always use the
selected program..."


Carol wrote:
> I got a new computer and went from Win98SE to XP.  I just realized that
> ALL my old documents from Win98SE that were created in WordPad, are not
> readable now. even though I have WordPad on the new system.  When I try to
> open them, I get the message:
> "Cannot load Word for Windows 6.0 files".  I don't understand that, because
> I never had Word for Windows.  For a brief period of time, I had a program
> that would read Word documents.  I tried it, because  people were
> sending me
> documents produced in Word that I couldn't read.
> Now I can't
> remember exactly why I uninstalled it, except that it was affecting my
> existing WordPad documents in some way.   I suppose it corrupted my Wordpad
> documents, although I was able to read them in WordPad on my old system as
> recently as the day I switched to the new system.  It's only my new system
> that is having problems with them, even though it has WordPad..  I KNOW the
> documents I'm trying to open now were
> created in WordPad, because they're documents I created myself within my
> old
> Win98SE system.  AND, they're documents I need badly.  (There are probably
> thousands of them covering several years.)
> Carol Hanson
>
>        The NOSPIN Group has added a new feature on our website,
>           web based bulletinboard for questions and answers:
>              Visit our sister website at http://nospin.com
>
>

        The NOSPIN Group has added a new feature on our website,
           web based bulletinboard for questions and answers:
              Visit our sister website at http://nospin.com