It turns out this was another case of what happens when AbiWord doesn't
append the .abw extension on file saves. When AbiWord opens a file with no
extension, you get the XML instead of the formatted document, thus getting
a document full of XML markup.
Again, this is one of the issues fixed for 0.7.2, which we will probably
cut around mid-July.
Robert Sievers
Open Source Evangelist