Corrupted file recourse?

[AHarper]

So, today had a... fairly odd incident. My UPS started shrieking that power was failing. This is fine -- it gives me time to save my work properly. This is what I did: I saved and exited from Open Office (as well as all other applicable programs) and shortly thereafter the computer lost power.

When power was restored and the computer rebooted, I found that OpenOffice wanted me to go through "registration" again. Weird, but okay. When I tried to open either file that was then open, I was prompted to choose encoding, with it defaulting to Japanese for no reason I could fathom. For the second one I tried, I took that, hoping for better results, but for the first I blind guessed ASCII and then, on later attempts, attempted to pick the standard unicode.

Either way, the files are now just a mess of ####, which searches lead me to believe means they're probably unable to be recovered in any way. I've tested other files and they open fine, but the two that were saved just before the outage are garbage. I'm lucky in that neither file is *too* critical -- no full unpublished novels or the like -- but I'm baffled as to why the files would be corrupted when I had already closed open office at the time of the power outage and if there is anything that could be done to actually retrieve either one.

EDIT: Running on Windows 10

[Hagar Delest]

See: [Tutorial] The Dreaded Pound Signs: file reduced to ####. Good luck. I hope you had backups.
For that only reason I would make the switch to LibreOffice (they have revamped the code to prevent that): [Tutorial] Considering a Switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice? Some Useful Information.

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