New laptop and MS office problem
 

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

For starters I would open up the Folder Options/File Types box and see what programs are listed as the default for each of the file types in question.

I would also consider uninstalling and reloading Office2000 and uninstalling any other MS office apps that Dell might have bundled with the computer such as MS Works.

Remember too when you are done reloading that there is about 200MB+ of updates to Office2000.