What's up with Windows?

[Eireann]

In the past couple of weeks, every time someone sends me a Word file, the name reads like this:

=_us-ascii_Q_[file name]=5FEN=2Edoc_=

Is this another Windows "upgrade"?

[barcode]

Possibly. I've got three guesses for this:

1) New feature where Word docs can be displayed in the browser (IE).
2) They used "Save as web page/HTML" or somesuch.
3) The mailer or security program that scanned the attachment/file has appended this when it parsed the file for tags/viruses/encoding.

I read it like this:

=_ {start of "tag" block}
us-ascii {United States - American Standard Code for Information Interchange}
_Q {Beats me... Quick view?}
_[file name] {Errr... filename}
=5F {Hex "5F" = ascii character "_" (underline)}
EN {ENglish}
=2E {Hex 2E = ascii character "." (period)}
doc {DOCument format for Word}
_= {end of tag}

So, the browser or program would parse this as:
{Using the us-ascii formatting, set the "Q" flag, open up the "filename_EN.doc", and display}

My hunch is the mailer's virus scanner is appending it as such, or the mailer itself is doing this to the attachment, so that the recipient's (your) computer knows that it came from another country, and will now know how to load it.

Sidenote: Linux (and, IIRC, Macs) use "unicode" formatting as default to get around this mess. Each language has its own character set(s), and will use "codepage" references, so it doesn't matter where the source or destination computers are, they'll still display (if the correct fonts are installed). Unlike Word, where they use their own crappy way of doing things. If you look at where Word/Office puts the files, you'll notice that any USA install gets shoved into a folder labelled "1033". This is MS shorthand for "US_English". I believe Windows Vista and 7 now have unicode as an option, and may be default for 64-bit versions. Your XP may be displaying it as such because it's not unicode aware?

As a test, you could try to have the sender install "7-Zip", use it to "zip" the doc before attaching it, and seeing if it makes it to you untagged (you'll also need 7-Zip to unzip it). Once unzipped, you should have the original unaltered filename.

barcode

[ender]

That's simple Q-encoding, which is normally used to store non-ASCII filenames. It's useless for ASCII (as it only makes the filename longer), but the fault is with whatever program you're using - it should've detected that the Q-encoding for US-ASCII is used, and unwrap the filename (note that the _ characters are probably ?'s, but since question mark is illegal in Windows filenames, the mailer replaces them with underscores before saving).