Why do they keep appearing the 404 Page Not found stats? Is someone attempting to hack my system? No, Not really.
These are requests from a user who has installed Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, and who has enabled the "Discuss" toolbar in his browser. When that toolbar is enabled, the browser will automatically query for these two files when visiting each site, to determine whether the Office Server Extensions are installed.
How could one get this to actually work?
This has to do with Office 2000. See Office 2000 and the web:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011382471033.aspx
If you have a Windows web server and a database server, you can install Office Server Extensions (available on the Office 2000 Professional or Premium CDs) and then the /MSOffice/cltreq.asp work, allowing visitors to discuss content. On the Tools menu in Excel for example, point to Online Collaboration, and click Web Discussions
For Office XP and 2003, this has been replaced by Sharepoint Team Server.
http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
From Excel 2003 Help:
The Web Discussions feature enables users to attach comments to a Web page or to any document that can be opened with a browser (Web browser: Software that interprets HTML files, formats them into Web pages, and displays them. A Web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, can follow hyperlinks, transfer files, and play sound or video files that are embedded in Web pages.) (such as .htm, .xls, .doc, and .ppt files) so that the comments appear with the document but are stored on a discussion server (discussion server: A computer that stores discussion text and information about the location of the file being discussed.).
Note The term document is used generically here to refer to any file you can open in a Microsoft Office application and view in a Web browser.
The discussions are threaded (threaded discussion: In an online forum, such as a newsgroup, a series of messages or articles in which replies to a message are nested directly under it instead of arranged in chronological or alphabetical order.). Users reviewing your document can use the Web Discussions toolbar to view and reply to any discussion. You can then review discussions and incorporate changes to your document based on the feedback you receive.