Newbie Word & Text file access?

[David Wilson]

Newbie question after checking about 500 messages on comp.lang.python : 
Using W2K on Intel, Python 2.2.1, and IDLE 0.8

Unsuccessful open() of MS Word (.doc) , Abiword (.abw) and text (.txt) 
files after successfully opening and reading HTML (.html) and LOG files.

Sample IDLE output:

 >>> open("C:\DownLoad\test1.txt","r")
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<pyshell#0>", line 1, in ?
     open("C:\DownLoad\test1.txt","r")
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\DownLoad\test1.txt'


1) What else is necessary to open these types of files?

2) Please advise where I can find documentation on IDLE and/or Python 
errors such as "[Errno 2]" above?

3) Is there a parser utility which can massage these formatted document 
files for faster/easier subsequent manipulation?

Thanks in advance.

ddw