>I'm using API GetFileAttributes in an ATTRIB function in our package. If you've never used it before, for a read-only, archive file, GetFileAttributes returns 33 ( 32 for A + 1 for R ).
>
>On my machine, however, it returns 8992. Yup, 8 thousand, 9 hundred, ninety two. OS is Win2k.

Convert it to hex, and you get:
#define FILE_ATTRIBUTE_ARCHIVE 0x00000020
#define FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY 0x00000100
#define FILE_ATTRIBUTE_SPARSE_FILE 0x00000200
#define FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NOT_CONTENT_INDEXED 0x00002000

>What can I possibly do to cure this little problem ?

If the actual attributes of the file *don't* match the above, I have no idea.