I thought we stopped doing the “m$” thing around 2010.
Word barely supports old Word files. Very few tools can reproduce .doc files other than Office itself, and even Office versions aren’t all compatible.
My approach would be to install some kind of Office on a machine and just script the hell out of opening files and saving them as docx or whatever open format Word supports these days. Word exposes a COM interface you can script against, so most programming languages and JScript or VBS can automate this process.
If you can figure out how to scan files in a loop, this snippet may get you started:
<span style="color:#323232;">Set word = CreateObject("Word.Application")
</span><span style="color:#323232;">word.Visible = True
</span><span style="color:#323232;">word.Documents.Open("C:Documents and SettingsUserHello.doc")
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Set doc = word.ActiveDocument
</span><span style="color:#323232;">doc.SaveAs "C:Documents and SettingsUserexport.docx", 16
</span><span style="color:#323232;">word.Quit()
</span>
To do this with reasonable speed, keep one instance of word around and close the documents rather than quitting Word every time you iterate through the list.