AFAIK Announcements and Events need to be viewed from within the respective web
part. We turned off the Reader role for Everyone for the top level Portal
Content folder because people were Subscribing to Announcemnets and Events and
then aising cain when the links in the emailed subscription notice did not work.

When you create announcements  with the announcement  editor, it creates a
file that you cannot open  directly with IE or Windows Explorer. It
usually looks like a zero-byte file with a name like a timestamp + the
author... something like 42920021124DOMAINusername. I believe all the
data about the announcement itself is stored in the metadata of the
file.

However, you may want to do what we do -- we create an accouncement-type
of file (with our company letterhead, using a template) and save  it as
.mht. I save it in the /Portal Content/Announcements folder, then
change the metadata to list the Title and Abstract.

Whammo! The announcement shows up just like all the others, but when
people click  on it, it brings up the announcement I created, with logos
and stuff, and the other good part  of it is that email notifications
work. They can click on the link in the email.

As long as you have the Announcement profile on the document, it'll
still act like an announcement with start/end dates, etc.

This sounds interesting. Does this mean that you must manually create these
announcements rather then use the create announcement  link?

Yes. But with templates and Word 2002, it's easy. I mean, you could
replace the announcement  web part's xsl to instead have "Add new
announcement" link point to a .dot that knows to save  in the
announcement folder.