thank you for all your replies. i never would have thought of trying to recover the text out of a .wps file. kword doesn't work, abiword doesn't work, openoffice.org doesn't work. i did find somebody on slashdot saying his wps files opened in kword, but you know it doesn't work.
The real solution would be for me to get the guy to send me the documents again in .doc format (it seems that .txt and .rtf are beyond his ability to understand). that's what's even more dumb, you can save as .doc files in msworks, so why use wps format? dumb. as for staroffice, i don't think i can get it now for free, and i only have the windows version (of 5.2) and what with me owning openoffice and not being a business, i don't want to pay for staroffice at present.
as for burning cds from mp3s, i found it was easy to convert mp3s and oggs to wavs using the xmms cdwriter output plugin, i didn't realise it would be so easy. and with xcdroast and a 48 speed CDwriter, i think i can live without my one stop app actually.
thanks again, all.