Thanks for the test files, all – they exposed a couple of interesting holes in my round-trip code. My plan here is just to automate round-tripping in a bundle of different versions of apps which can read/write the file type I was given. So it’s not really going to do anything that the man in the street couldn’t do himself, it’s just going to save installing OO2 on the off-chance it recovers your file. I think it’ll supply a report saying “here’s a copy round-tripped in x, here’s a copy round-tripped in y” and you can pick the least corrupted one.

At the moment it only uses OpenOffice 3.1 but it’ll eventually use other versions, along with MS Office. Any other ideas (especially test files) very much appreciated. Just to be above-board here, this isn’t suddenly going to turn into a paid-for service, but eventually a long way down the line I may support it with advertising or allow people to pay to jump the queue (some files take 5+ minutes!).