I had once the same question, because I wanted to separate the drum instruments of my old recordings, i.e. I had only a stereo track for the drums.
With some search on the internet I found a very cool FREE tool:
ISSE - interactive sound source separation editor
It is not 100% perfect, but with some work you can really separate sound sources contained in a stereo wave file. You have to cut out one instrument after the other from the remaining audio. ISSE is very amazing and free! Have a look!
P.S.: By the way I have also tried with the Melodyne Editor. They make a lot of advertising about their separation and this software is not cheap, but it cannot really separate different instruments! Not even the kick or snare can be separated on a stereo drum track. I was really disappointed!
The only thing that I could do with it was to separate to choir voices that I had in a mono track.