Windows 7 - Compatibility Mode

Good Evening Folks:

I have just recently started running Windows 7 (much to my chagrin) and I transferred my files written with Office 2010 in Vista. All these files show up as file such aqnd such (compatibility mode). What is compatibility mode and does it have anything to do with the fact that when I open one of these files I get a sidebar asking me which one of the saved versions I wish to run?

Regards
Powell Lucas

Screenshots would be nice, but as far as I understood:

Basically, Compatibility mode is used to open documents created in earlier versions of Word.
You can read more about compatibility here.

But, it is noticed that if you open a DOCX 2010 document created in Word 2010, but on another computer, it will be opened in [Read Only] as well as [Compatibility mode] or [Protected View]. I guess, this is made for protection from potential malicious includings. If you are sure about origin of the file you can do File - Info - Convert and then save the document.

Now, regarding Document Recovery. It is not connected to Compatibility mode anyhow. Completely different feature. It was designed to save files when modified file will be closed without saving or Word itself crashes or to return to earlier version of the document.

Thanks for your reply Neutron 16:

I'm not having any problem revising or adding to the files, and since I save them to disk every day I'm not worried about losing them. I was just curious as to whether or not this could create future problems.

Regards
Powell Lucas