Being saved to a temporary document

[David Trimboli]

I've got several users in a subnet who are experiencing an intermittent
problem when saving Excel files. They get an error message:

Your changes could not be saved to '...', but were saved to a temporary
document named '...'. Close the existing document, then open the temporary
document and save it under a new name.

The first '...' is the original file name; the second '...' is a bunch of
numbers. The new file with the numbers in the name is saved in the same
location, and does not have an extension.

I've found a bit of information on Microsoft's support pages about this, but
it only tells what the result of the error is. It doesn't tell me in any
way what is causing this problem.

The users all have full control of the network shares where these files are.
We are certain that files experiencing this problem are not being accessed
by multiple users simultaneously. The files are not read-only. The problem
is intermittent. The client computers all have Windows 2000 Professional.
The share is NTFS.

Does anybody know why this is happening?

David
Stardate 4281.4

 

[Dave Peterson]

When excel saves the file, it saves it as a temporary file with a funny name.

If the save is successful, xl will delete the original and if that's successful,
xl will rename the funny named file to the original's name.

Common things that get blamed for interruptions to this process are antivirus
software poking its head in or network errors--either permissions or physical
problems.

But with intermittent problems, it could be difficult to isolate. Can you
temporarily disable the antivirus software?

If you do and that doesn't correct it, can you isolate the problem to only a few
pcs? Maybe something is wrong with that branch of the network.

Until you (or your IT department) determine the problem (and fix it!), I'd save
to my local harddrive and use windows explorer to copy to the network share.

 

[David Trimboli]

Thanks for the advice, Dave. Running for several days without anti-virus
protection isn't really an option, though it's a good idea. So far the
problem has been confined to a single subnet in a single building, so that
may have something to do with it, but getting the administrator-types to
look into it is also problematical . . . .

David
Stardate 4283.7