Problems Savings Excel 2000 & Office 2000 files

[Brian Bartley]

We are seeing issues when saving files to user directory
on a windows 2000 server. The users are all using
Windows 2000 pro systems & Office 2000 Pro. The original
files will disappear & a new file with a random 8
character name will appear in their directory. The file
will have no security permissions associated with it. It
is not happening all of the time, just random. The
servers are all Dell 1500sc or 1600sc w/1.2 gig of ram
and 60 gig of hd space on the shared directory. The
servers are also acting as a print server as well as
running Norton Anti-Virus Corp Edition 7.6. All of the
user work stations are also running NAV. We are able to
go to the 8 character files as domain admins, take
ownership of the files, assign the proper permissions and
have the user open the file & all data will be there.
Any ideas?

 

[Jan Karel Pieterse]

Hi Brian,

A possible cause for this problem can be your Virus software.

Excel has a funny saving process:

1 Saves to a temporary file
2 If OK, deletes the original
3 Renames Temp file to filename of original.

If in stage 2 or 3 of this process the virus software starts scanning
the TEMP file, XL's process gets interrupted and you get a file not
saved message.

So try changing the settings of the virus scanner.

Another cause can be that the user does not have delete rights to the
directory in question and Excels saving process fails on step 2.

Check out these articles for more information:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;103329

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;121942

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse
Excel MVP
www.jkp-ads.com