File or Directory is Corrupted or Unreadable?

My computer is fairly new(less than two months), It's a Studio 17 laptop with Vista Home Premium. I loaded a few word documents on from my old computer, and made a few more and put them into a folder in My Documents. Nothing seemed wrong at the time, but a few weeks later I went to open the folder and it gave me the massage "file or directory is corrupt or unreadble". It isn't an error message and doesn't have a number with it or anything. If I search for the documents inside the folder they show up, but when I try to open them Word opens up but then says it cannot find the file. If I right click the folder or the files and look at the properties it shows that they don't have anything in them (0 bytes) in the general section, but under the details it shows the number of words and the size (12 Kb for example) and all the other stuff it should normally show. 

I don't know why I'm having this problem, considering nothing happened with the documents and I had viewed them inside the folder prior to this problem occuring. I'm hesitent to make more documents on my computer if they are going to have this error too. I couldn't find any information about this on the site. Does anyone know what happened, and how I can fix it? And is there a way to fix the documents that I lost?