Reading Office Files in Linux...

[Bill McGonigle]

Well, firstly update to Open Office 2:

   http://marketing.openoffice.org/2.0/featureguide.html

If that's not possible, the easiest thing might be to fire up your 
VMWare instance and run the document through MS Office thusly:

   1.)    Open a protected document in Word.
   2.)    Choose the Save As Web Page (*.htm; *.html) option and close 
Word.
   3.)    Open the HTML document in any text editor.
   4.)    Search the <w:UnprotectPassword> tag for a line that looks 
like: <w:UnprotectPassword>ABCDEF01</w:UnprotectPassword>.
          Gather the password.
   5.)    Open the original .doc document with any hex editor.
   6.)    Search for hex values of the password (reverse order).
   7.)    Overwrite all four double-bytes with 0x00. Save, and close.
   8.)    Open the document in Word. Select Tools, Unprotect Document. 
Password is blank.
(Courtesy Thorsten Delbrouck)

Parts 3-7 are a 20-minute perl script if you have to do this much.

-Bill

(and my mention of perl is purely intended to provoke a pythonista into 
posting working code here within the next hour so I don't have to do it 
myself).

-----
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
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