Tom,

You may be running into the "old file protection" from Office 2003 SP3 -
basically, it treated anything from long ago or other programs as malware,
and doesn't trust you to open them responsibly.

You can try this tool to reset your registry settings:

http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...blockExcel.reg

HTH,
Bernie
MS Excel MVP


"Tom" wrote in message
...
When I try to open old files, I get "Excel cannot acces (file name). The
document may be Read-only or encrypted."

But they aren't read-only, and I have no idea how to encrypt a file. The
files have unrestricted permission. At this point, I can't even delete
them,
although I don't want to do that. They bare completely unaccessible.
Same
applies to Word documents.

These files were created in the 1994 version of Excel. I loaded Excel
2003
last year when the problem started.