Decrypting old MS Word docs

[Stephen R Laniel]

I found a pile of old MS Word documents -- probably from the
2.0 or 6.0 era -- that I wrote a long time ago, encrypted,
and promptly forgot the password to. Now I'd like to decrypt
them. Lots of googling only found me a lot of non-beerfree
tools, and it seems pretty silly to pay for such a thing. Is
there a free-software tool to handle cracking MS Word
passwords? Barring that, is the format of MS Word encryption
laid out anywhere? If so, I'm sure it's easy to write a
little tool myself to do what I need.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key