Environment
Novell Client for Vista
Novell Client for Vista 1.0.0 File Access
Windows 7
Windows 7
Situation
Windows Vista (with/without) SP1
Office 2007 Plus
Novell Client for Vista, Update 6 (file-caching disabled/enabled)
Netware 6.5 SP 7
McAfee Antivirus (on/off)
When opening Microsoft office documents, very often a message appears stating that this file is already opened by another user or is write protected.
The problem is reproduceable with any office type file on any Novell network drive.
The problem only occurs when attempting to open the office document from the Vista explorer window and double clicking to open.
The problem only occurs when opening the file quickly (double clicking very fast) in the explorer window to open the file.
Resolution
The problem is occurring when in Windows Explorer, the following setting is enabled:
In Explorer -> Organize -> Layout -> Detail Window
This detail window displays addtional file information at the bottom of the explorer window. This window shows all the defined extended file information that is setable on office type documents. For example (author, company, etc)
When you attempt to access an office document the explorer application opens the file and reads the header information that defines the extended office data. If the user attempts to open the document while explorer is still reading the header information, then the Novell client receives a file open error from the server.
The Novell client is reporting the correct information that the file is already open. To eliminate the condition disable the detail window in explorer.
Customers have also reported that by disabling this detail window in explorer that network browsing seems to be a lot faster.