Saves as "READ ONLY"

[Michele]

We have two people here who are having difficulty saving a Word document. It is Word '97 on XP operating system. They call up a word document, make their changes and then save it. When they call the document back up, it comes back up as a "READ ONLY" document. This is only recently happening. I can't figure out what would cause that. Of course, if you look at the properties of the file, "READ ONLY" is not checked. Can someone help? Thanks

Michele

 

[Michele]

I have to add - it's not just one document, but several..

Michele

 

[Rob Schneider]

Saved to C: (or other local) disk, CD, or to file server?

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Rob Schneider]

It therefore is possible that the server is running Samba and Linux to
provide file server services to your XP machines. We experienced same
behaviour with Samba with Office 2003 apps in XP using Samba 2.x. I've
not tried Samba 3.x yet.

In the Samba configuration file (normally /etc/samba/smb.conf on the
Linux server), add a global option

[global]
nt acl support = no

By default Samba sets this "yes". When set "yes" when you open files
in Windows applications, e.g. Excel, Word, etc. the files are opened in
"read only" mode no matter what permissions are applied and controlled
by Samba and the Linux server.

I've not yet researched how this change works or if there are any
security implications. However, it does fix the problem we experienced
and I documented it and providing this info to you. Check with the
folks who run the server.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Michele]

The file server is running Novell.

 

[Rob Schneider]

Perhaps the same issue ... speak to the system admins.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Guest]

I have been struggling with the same issue in my
organization. I also have only a couple of users that
reopen the documents they just worked on, only to find that
they are marked as read only.

Through some research I have narrowed down what I think the
cause is. When an office document is opened, a temp copy is
created while the document is being worked on. When the
file is saved and closed, the temp file is deleted. I have
found that for some unknown reason, these temp files
sometimes don't get deleted and when the user goes to open
the doc and the system sees a temp file already open, it
assumes that someone else already has that document open
and marks the 2nd copy as read only.

You can manually delete these and in most cases the problem
goes away, I just need to find out why this only impacts
the same two users.

We are looking at using a backup overnight to prune the
temp files that did not get deleted from the system so that
we don't have to manually deal with this on a day to day basis.

Hope this helps!

-----Original Message-----
We have two people here who are having difficulty saving a

Word document. It is Word '97 on XP operating system.
They call up a word document, make their changes and then
save it. When they call the document back up, it comes
back up as a "READ ONLY" document. This is only recently
happening. I can't figure out what would cause that. Of
course, if you look at the properties of the file, "READ
ONLY" is not checked. Can someone help? Thanks.

 

[Stefan Blom]

For more about this, see:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/LockedFiles.htm

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There is a known problem that causes this (Word's failure to delete "owner"
files). If I recall correctly, it has to do with "SMB packet signing"
(whatever that is). Search word.application.errors in Google Groups for
this, and you'll probably find a post from Terry Farrell on the subject.

 

[David Brown]

I recently found some MS KB articles that may address this.
KB 326549 - cannot view or change the RO attribute on folders
KB 328170 - files open as Read-Only or Access-Denied
KB 814112 - file opens as read only