THEO@TO. wrote:
For years I've been taking .jpgs and pasting them in WordPad
documents and thought it was a great thing to be able to do it.
I've done hundreds of documents like that and never had any
problems. But now all of a sudden they don't show the pictures or
even the text anymore, but instead it's just a bunch of symbols
like y's with dots over them and rectangular blocks, etc... Can
anyone explain what happened and how to make it work the way it
did before?

I don't know what was modified or upgraded on your system but you tried
opening them using a freeware copy of Open Office? You can find it he
http://www.openoffice.org/. Might be an alternative way to keep your "old"
files workable.