@hexafraction: Thanks for explaining what JSON is. I opened it up and it doesn't look like what you describe for JSON, so I guess its possible, a good chance that its not electrum...hmmm.

@hcp:    There are indeed a bunch of random characters and it looks like alien code or something. Possibly litecoin core wallet? dont know... will look into it further on litecoin forums. but can't say that I remember downloading the entire network in the past... but maybe i did .. who knows.

I just know one thing and that is its a real issue that i cant open this file, when i never encrypted this wallet and saved it on to a local external drive. Electrum should have warned us a little more visibly on their website that this could've been an issue in the future.

a big part of it is my fault for not saving the private keys, which was a class-a stupid thing to do, but i did test it after saving and opened it right up, so i figured, it would be fine in the future. I wouldn't have ever imagined this being an issue.

oh well... live and learn