Vista - RTF file issues

Okay, I hope I'm posting this in the right forum, if not feel free to correct me.

I'm having a few issues opening rtf files on our computer at work. The file itself was written in wordpad and saved as an rtf. I saved it to a flash drive, exited out of the program and did some other work. Then, an hour later I reopened wordpad and when I went to open the rtf file, it was completely blank. Same computer, same system login, hell I didn't even remove the flashdrive. The title bar at the top of the window read the file name, but the body text had vanished. I could add more writing and it would ask me if I wanted to save changes, but the initial text had vanished.

I'd really rather not have to retype the three pages of stuff i'd done so I'd like to know if there's a way to fix this. Is it just user error, or is it an issue with the program?

Please note, this is a VERY basic vista setup. No Microsoft word, office or any other word processor.