RTF files won't open; Icons replaced with dotted rectangles in Finder

Hello all, I am trying to troubleshoot a friend's computer. She uses TextEdit to take notes and saves her files as RTFs. A while ago she complained that one of her textfiles wouldn't open, even though she could see the file in the Open dialog in TextEdit. However, the file as it appears in the Open dialog does not have the traditional RTF icon. It is replaced with a dotted rectangle. This error happened again a few days ago.
The problem has only occurred with a few text files. Others work.
Here are a couple of screenshots:
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~djf35/rtf1.png
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~djf35/rtf2.png
Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Thanks. That seems to have fixed it. I logged out and then logged in to a different account. The problem wasn't there and I could open the files. Then I logged out and then back into my original account and the problem had been fixed there as well. Thanks so much for your invauable help and quick responses.
J

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Hi Ken
I wish the 7.1 updater download had helped but it didn¹t. All the files
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Below is the message to send to Apple, which did not go through their report
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I am not late with updating the site, which is about New Zealand culture,
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Could a reciprocal link have caused a problem?
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I really appreciate the help though.
Cheers Yvonne
From: Ken Binney <[email protected]>
Reply-To: <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:42:11 -0700
To: Yvonne and Bill Hynson <[email protected]>
Subject: HELP! Files won't open and previously had Firefox
icon instead of DW icons! Leap Year thing?
Re: HELP! Files won't open and previously had Firefox icon instead of DW
icons! Leap Year thing?
created by Ken Binney <http://forums.adobe.com/people/Ken+Binney> in
Dreamweaver - View the full discussion
<http://forums.adobe.com/message/4236682#4236682>
Not necessarily related, but did you also install the 7.1
updater? http://www.adobe.com/support/dreamweaver/downloads_updaters.html
Windows or MAC?
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[post moved from other forum]
I finished my Powerbook's hardware upgrade with success yesterday(with thanks to JPL, Sig, A_Brody and other's great advice). System is now Powerbook G3 400 Firewire with 512mbRam, new 40GB HDD, and OS-X Tiger. However...
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Mac OS 9.2.2 on New 30GB HD
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??? Why would I be having to choose which application would open an application---wouldn't an app open on its own (Unix Executable File")
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MSG-PWRBkG3
PS:
Sorry for the long post. But, I have included as much up-front details as possible to assist in your replies. I also want to help others reading this thread later on as to what (correct or incorrect) procedures were followed... to help them see how these in-compatibility scenerios would be similiar to their situations... leading to solutions for all.

Thank you for including as much detail as you did. It makes it much easier to troubleshoot this type of issue. What I'll do is basically follow along with the procedure you used and point out where you (unknowingly) ran into problems.
"Back-up all files on the old 10GB HDD to an external USB drive."
Okay, I'm betting that this external USB drive was formatted as PC-Exchange/Windows format. Since this type of disk format doesn't have native support for the special "Mac" information about files (such as resource forks and HFS metadata like file type and creator codes), when Mac OS writes files to these disks, it needs to use a special method. When you copy the files from OS 9, OS 9 adds special "FINDER.DAT" files and also stores the resource-fork-parts of the original files inside a "RESOURCE.FRK" folder on the disk. My FAQ goes into more detail about this. When, from OS 9, you look at the files you just copied to the PC-formatted disk, and they appear identical to the files on your original 10 GB hard drive, that is in fact a complete illusion. The files as they exist on the PC-formatted disk are very different from what they appear. When you hook it up to your OS 9 Mac, the files appear fine, and you can copy them and have them work just like the original files did. If, on the other hand, you hook this PC-formatted hard drive up to your OS X Mac, it looks at the files in a completely different way. If you copy the files off of this disk from OS X, most of the files won't be usable.
"Remove old and replace w/new 40GB HDD, also install new 512MB PC-133 RAM module in lower slot."
"booted from old OS CD and ran Hard drive set-up utility with two partitions, one 30GB the other 10GB."
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"Onto same partition, ran OS-9 Update 9.1.0, then 9.2.1, then fireware update 4.1.8f5, then Update 9.2.1"
"Installed OS-X Tiger onto the first 30GB partition"
"Moved all backed-up files from the external USB drive onto the second 10GB partition."
If you did this from OS X, you will run into problems, whereas if you do this from OS 9, you'll be okay. The reason for this, as I mentioned above, is that OS X doesn't know how to "see" the files in the same way that OS 9 does.
This is what I would do. Make sure you still have the PC-formatted drive with the files you backed up from OS 9. Reboot into one of your versions of OS 9 that works properly. Hook up the external USB drive, and the files on it should appear properly and function properly. Now copy the files over onto your local hard drive and they should work properly as well. The files that you copied over from OS X won't be useful and can be deleted. Then reboot into OS X and you should be all set.
Hope this helps....
Dual 2.7 GHz PowerPC G5 w/ 2.5 GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.5)

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