text shows up as squares

[davmac]

hi,I have a sony usb memory stick and any word documents only show as squares. I can make a new doc and copy it to the memory stick and open it and its fine, however if i remove the stick and replace it and then open the doc again it shows up as a page of squares, I have ran regedit,and followed the path
hkey_local_machine\sofware\mirosoft\windows\curren tversion\applets\wordpad, and getting there clicked on dword value and typed in allowconversions and then clicked modify and in the data box changed the 0 to 1 . having done all this NOTHING its still the same. any idea's please

[davmac]

hi, just a reply to myself and anyone interested, it seems that the files are lighty lost forever, I have read that you should never save directly to the usb stick instead drag 'n' drop or copy and paste to the usb or files could become corrupted, I then reformatted the stick tryed copy and paste and is all good again. hope this can help anyone else with the same prob.

[Reapers]

text shows up as squares usually means that it the file extension is unreadable for wordpad.

try copying the files to pc then opening by right click on the files then microsoft word if that works then.if you know it worked previously on wordpad then your wordpad maybe corrupt

Go to the Control Panel/Folder Options/View tab, set it to "Show hidden
files and folders" and uncheck "Hide protected operating system files
[recommended]". Also uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types".

Then, open Windows Explorer from Start/All Programs and go to the
C:\Windows\Inf folder. Locate the wordpad.inf file, right-click it and
choose install.

You may need to either insert your WinXP CD or know where your I386 folder
is located on the hard drive. You may also need to know where the
\ServicePackFiles folder is (usually under the Windows directory).