Thanks again, Randy.
Sorry about the confusion. The *.wps extension appeared only after doing a "save" in Notepad but suddenly changed to .DOC (yes, in caps!) when copying them to the flash drive. Windows7 would not read them.
I finally hit on the idea of opening Win Word, going to "My Docs" and finding the files there. That allowed me to save them in something called "MS DOS with line breaks" after finding out that "rich text" (*.rtf) would result in "cannot open file as it's being used by another program" (???) when opened in Win 7.
As you mentioned in your first response, I have to rename and save each file individually but that doesn't bother me since only about 15 files are involved.