Word 2000 not opening properly.

Hi,

I’ve recently experienced opening Word 2000. When I try to open a work document which has been saved, it either does not open at all OR it opens itself but with strange characters.

Sometimes the document I just typed is lost and I can onlysee it in ~xyx.doc format (where tilde (~) is the preceding character), if this is the case then that particular document is corrupted.

WHY AND WHAT is causing this, is there a way I can fix this from happening at all?

please help. thank you