Holliday, adaseb, and CjMapope, let's have some addresses.

xhomerx10, eat a bag of dicks.  Welcome to the marketplace.

I just opened it in notepad, it's just a huge mess of symbols/letters/numbers/etc. Do I actually highlight/copy/paste that garbled mess somewhere? Or maybe drag it out of there onto my desktop?

HA!  Excellence, I found the wallet.dat file thanks to you.  Now what do I do with it?
 Lol, if this results in bitcoin, I'll send you a tip!

Thank you, Holliday, for not being a dick.  Can you tell me in which folder I should be looking for the wallet.dat file? I'm pretty sure I opened them all and looked everywhere, maybe there's a stone I'm leaving unturned?  More importantly, do you know why I can't just open the bitcoin-qt wallet (why it just spins and spins without showing me the user interface and beginning to download the blockchain, like it always did before)? Here's what I'm looking at in the bitcoin folder to begin with (can't upload a screenshot here?):



daemon
src
bitcoin-qt.exe
COPYING.txt
readme.txt
uninstall.exe

I "know" there are coins on the drive because I "put them on it". I can't remember how much is on it, but I remember I was pissed when I lost the drive during a move. One puts coins in a wallet by sending them to an address represented by a long string of numbers and letters; it has nothing to do with knowing what a "wallet.dat" file is.

I just found an old thumbdrive in my old curios/relics box with bitcoin-qt.exe 0.8.1.0 on it.  I know there is bitcoin on this drive, but when I click on bitcoin-qt.exe, it just spins and spins and spins, and never actually opens the wallet up. It does nothing at all. 

My friend told me to look for "the .dat files", but I don't see any files in the bitcoin-qt folder suffixed with ".dat". 

What form of magic is required to jar this wallet open so I can move the bitcoin to a better place?