On a temp basis I solved my problem but for future can somebody give me a clue . . .
Just went to Wins 7 at home. Also brand new to Office 07 at both work and home. I emailed myself Excel 2007 files and down loaded them on to my new Win 7 machine. They downloaded as XML files. Three different files, all automatically compress and when extracted they parsed out the files into xml sub files.
I ended up going to different machine that still had the XP os and they downloaded as regular xls files.
Any idea how to get around this in the future?
TIA