Office 2010 will not open document prepared at home in 2003 format

Strange one here. A teacher came to me today saying a couple of Word documents he prepared at home in 97 - 200-3 format will not open in Office 2010. Clicking them brings up a File Conversion box showing Windows Western European as default but clicking ok on that brings up a few lines of code on the 289KB document. Any suggestions please?

Do you have a gmail account? open the documents in google docs then re save them as a .doc. That works for me if I come across some documents that will not work. Google docs seems to open everything.