Ron

You should always save or open documents from your local hard disk and never
from removable media. Word has to create temporary files in the target
directory and if this is a removable disks, there's a high likelihood of
corruption. Try copying the files to the HDD first: but it does sound as
though they are already corrupted. You may be able to rescue some data using
the Recover Text from Any File option or possibly opening the files in
WordPad or even NotePad.

I have a number of large text files saved on a Zip disk
using Word 2000.  Have accessed these often for updating
and never had a problem. Now, when attempting to open I
get pages filled with little boxes instead of the text and
can't get the text back.  What can I do?  Thanks much for
any help.