[Godolphin&fellow]

I've got a large number of wordpad documents with formatted text. On
my old computer they were stored simply as documents (*.doc). I put
these onto a cd as data files. Due to some changes Microsoft has made
between Windows98 and Vista, when they are opened on the new computer,
as '.doc' files, all formating is lost, (plus, alot of meaningless
characters, gibberish, are added onto each page when opened). The
problem seems to be that the Vista-based computer saves formatted
texts as rich text documents. Is there some way I can have them 'open
as a rich text document' directly from the cd... or use some other
trick so that the formatting will be preserved?