I bought a new laptop (dell inspiron) and when i got it I loaded my copy of office 2000 on it. All went smoothly, however now when i create an Excel spreadsheet or Word document and save it as such, it does not show up in my documents (or wherever I save it to) as a Word or excel document,the extensions are correct (.xls or .doc) but if i try and open the Word doc it opens in wordpad, if I try an open an Excel file I get the dialogue box saying "windows does not know what program created this file...) also some files are backed up automatically and they do show as Excel files.

This is a major pain in the A$$

Any thoughts or suggestions
Running XP pro