Dlomshek.... I'm not sure what happened, but the Downward Compatibility utility normally works well, and does what it's supposed to do. I've used it sucessfully many times in the past, but never with R18 (my employer hasn't upgraded to that yet).
As explained in the Help files, the Downward Compatibility utility will convert from a higher release to a lower release, but all PartBodies will be converted to 'dumb' solids with no history. This is so that new geometry types added in the higher release will not be incompatible with the lower release.
So, if you convert your R18 file to an R14 file, it will not have solids history when you open it with any release of CATIA V5.
But, hopefully you still have the original R18 file to open and modify with that release of CATIA.
I don't know why you couldn't open the R14 file with the R14 release of CATIA. Was there an error message?
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