Please, help with word and excel opening/reading problem

Greetings,

I have a problem of opening ms word and excel files on my computer. The files are there for a long time. I use to open and modify them. Suddenly, when i try to open the word files, a dialog box appears that says "There was an error opening the file". when i try to open the excel files, a dialog box appears that says "File format not valid". I have tried to create a new word and excel files, save them and when i try to open these new files, they are opened with no error. However, all the older files do not open and show the above message. I also tried to repair and reload office 2003, system restore, but the problem is there. I can open any new word and excel files, but the problem is with the older ones. I don't think the problem is with ms office. Because, if the problem is with ms office, it wouldn't have opened the new files. Can anybody help me with this?

Thanks,

re: Please, help with word and excel opening/reading problem

Have you tried copying the files to a disk and opening them on another computer? Also you mentioned you were replacing files what exactly did you mean? Are you referring to the actual documents?

Let me know how this works out.