Ah good--glad it worked for you. I dug up an old laptop that still had 8.6, and found the solution there, because I couldn't find the right search terms in the Apple Tech Support Library. Thanks for letting all of us know what worked.

BTW, the grey dog-eared icon is the generic one for all unallocated files. Appleworks docs are colored icons. Sounds like you might need to rebuild your desktop file to match all the docs to the right app.
Just hold down the command and option keys on startup (you can wait until just before the hard-disk icon is about to load). You'll see a dialog asking if you want to rebuild the desktop file--say yes.