I had Office 2003 Pro running on a Windows 7 Home Premium laptop. Motherboard went so I bought a refurbished laptop running on Windows 7 Pro, loaded my Office 2003 Pro on it from the original set-up disk - no problems - and restored all my files from my Iomega backup drive to the new machine. Weird thing is, hundreds of my .doc files are opening normally with MS Word, but quite a lot are opening as .docx Word Pad files (which didn't exist on my old machine), often with skewed formatting. If I try to open them with MS Word I just get code gibberish. The ones doing this seem to be those that had anything other than simple text in them - eg tables with coloured graphics in them, letterhead templates etc. All my Excel and Access files seem to be OK.  When I look at the original Word .doc files on the Iomega back-up drive they too are displaying the same screwed-up way; ditto if I connect my old hard drive to the new machine via USB and view them there. Ditto if I restore the files from that old hard drive and not from my Iomega back-up drive.  ie it seems to be some kind of incompatibility between Office 2003 Pro and the new laptops Windows 7 Pro operating system (my old one was Windows Home Premium) that's causing the trouble. I searched Microsoft website for downloads to solve the problem but none of them seem to be for problems like this with Office 2003.  Any help will be very gratefully received.

Just found the solution. On my old laptop Outlook 2003 had had the 2007 compatibility pack downloaded to it but of course this was lost when I used the start-up disk to load it on the new laptop. Fortunately the download was still available from Microsoft, so problem solved and all my Word files opening normally again.

• Edited by Bert N 13 hours 4 minutes ago