Ruined MS Word documents

[Stephen Blakley]

Hello all. I'm new here and have a question. All of a sudden one (of
four) MS word document subdirectories has a problem. All documents in
this subdirectory do not open properly. (All other subdirectories are ok).

This is what I get when I try to open the documents in this particular
subdirectory....

--"—À}Âô«iq=﷓àÙäÃ!ju’­s’Ñi g[ñK™’0(xÃ.`|þ(
ï’æ¤ç˜IXw&$}&øLa [óFI1ª^Öä̎˺k‰Â΄ Oî [V Œð½—¹ôIg&P‘ûÙ_X?ÊYG qázg(97
‡ëõ¥Øho¦Ëïøôl°
âQ21à òö¦ MWn7ŸM e­¡ÒÆ@þ¯Ž L·çï9§. Z`ÜïÂÛËï ÉWG[c­ ¢Žl\£~
w«–m’Ùѵ Å `[b •€ð¹ÿ~yÓ×ĆTšá5søÞ<ŸíÑ,¸.¯ó~ÆbÂ¥J |ü‰ê 4ÃÅ’ Å„ÃfIm «<Žü4ó¯
%V+àÕ¨G˜Ë®Â»æ ­æÛ
}ÂÃ¥8_÷·ÊËŠê\IeXß› RªN


Can I assume this is some type of virus? I have some of the doucments
backed up but of course not all of them.

Anyone know what the problem is?

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

If other folders' documents open correctly, I would attribute this either to
a virus or to disk corruption.

 

[Stephen Blakley]

I was afraid of that. Thanks....

 

[alborg]

Have you scanned your disk yet? One of my favorite antivirus checkers is AVG-
it's free for personal use (http://free.grisoft.com/) and you can also do an
on-line scan using McAfee from here-
http://www.rcn.com/customer/virusscan.php. One of my favorite active-file
checkers is hijackthis.exe. It's free and allows you to see if there are any
weird active processes going on in the background, and if so, you can delete
them. Look up "hijackthis.exe" on Google where you'll find a whole host of
websites where folks will help you figure out the printout and generally help
you clean out your disk.

Cheers,
Al