I have been working on a document that is extremly important that wants to cause me great frustration. I went to open it today and was initially faced with a pop up box :

ASCII filter options

character set[Unicode UTF-8]

Default fonts[Times New Roman]

Langauge[English]

etc etc etc

Regarless of if I chose "cancel" or "ok" change/dont change options, I then recive this pop up

DOCUMENT IN USE

blah blah is locked for editing by unknown user
I am then given the option to either "Open read only"/"Open a Copy"/"Cancel"

Opening one of these options brings me to a completly blank page!! If I look at the file in /Documents then it shows 0 bytes in the properties. Where is all of my work? Please no one tell me to enable the backup settings as I have NOW done that(this is not set as default because....??)anyway. I need to know how to save This document not close the gate after the horse has bolted.


Details:
OS - Ubuntu 12.04
RAM 2.5GB
Dual Core

What do you really want to open? Is this a MS word file? Is your filesystem write enabled? Try to make a copy of it and open that file.