[libreoffice-users] "Message URL seems to be an unsupported one" when importing .sdw files

Somewhere along the development path OO/LO has lost the facility to open 
StarOffice 1.x ".sdw" (Writer) files directly.

I have just switched from OO to LO, and have a small number of old sdw 
files I need to open and update to the .odt file format.

The LO help says to use the file import wizard, but when I tried this on 
a folder containing (amongst some other files) 5 .sdw files, I hit the 
error-

   BASIC runtime error
   An exception occurred
   type com.sun.start.lang.IllegalArgumentException
   Message URL seems to be an unsupported one

At this point the BASIC window is hung, you can't exit the script 
because it says it's still running, but the stop button in the macro 
window is inactive. The only way out is to kill off soffice.bin from the 
task manager, nasty.

Now it was LO that found the 5 files in the first place, so it seems odd 
it should then decide it can't handle them?

After the first failed attempt I wondered if the problem coiuld be 
because the files were on a network-mounted drive, or because there were 
other (LO and non-LO) files in the same folder, so I made a new folder 
on the windows desktop with just 4 .sdw files in it, but the same error 
occurred.

Is LO no longer able to open StartOffice files?

If this is the case, is finding an installing an older version of 
OpenOffice my only route to recovering these files?

Regards: Colin

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