I copied some old microsoft works documents I need for work . . . (of course) and put them in a documents folder in my bin, and when I try to open them either from there, or from the word procsessor, I get a small error box that says:

general error
general input/output error


So . . . any ideas of what thios means? as a side note(and probably the most important piece of information, koffice cant open them either. I thought maybe they were corrupted and sio I erased them and copied them again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In my limited experience with works files, you're going to lose that battle every day. Word can't even open works files without a special converter, and that only works sometimes.

Your best bet is to find someone with works and have them open the files and convert them to .rtf or .doc or .txt files.

I'm not sure if open office can open works documents, only only word. It's been a while since I've used works, so I don't remember what other file types it lets you save into, but that's probably the easiest solution. If you do find something that opens works files I'd like to know. My mom uses it and can't seem to figure out how to save into a different format on her own, which means I usually have to boot into windows if I want to open something she sends me.

In an era when we are hearing more about standardized formats, it is past annoying to be reminded how MS could not even have standards within their own walls.

I thought that converters were out there--have you Googled? I found one link to Microsoft that looks very official....

I've used that MS Works --> Word converter from the MS website. Let me just say that I had a 10% (1/10 files my Grandma sent me) success rate of opening works files with word using the converter. I ended up buying an old copy of works for cheap on ebay just so I could convert the files to something else (I want to say RTF was supported). Anyway, the next time I went over there I promptly installed open office and told her to use it from now on...