Links and Word.Docs

Hello everyone,

I need some help - bigtime! I am a web producer for a major company and I have been asked to look into this.

When a user is clicking a link to a word.doc, if he/she is running Office 2000, he/she will be prompted with a password prompt. The user can just click on the cancel button and then will be able to access the word.doc.

My question is does anyone know how this issue is being handled by companies these days? My companies' website has quite a few word.docs on it and we are trying to solve the password prompt problem. All we have learned so far is that it is caused by Office 2000.

Should these links have a warning message warning the user of the upcoming password prompt box? Or should the word.docs just be converted to .zip files?

Can someone out there please help? I'd really appreciate it since I have been doing this research close to 2 days now by going into some very reputable web sites to see how the other companies are handling this and so far, I have not been able to find one word.doc used as a link.

Thanks.

Ms. Webmaster