Word vs. Excel on Netware volume

discgolfer · #1 (**permalink**) 05-01-2005, 04:50 PM

I hope this is the right forum, if not my apologies.

One of my users (Netware 6.0, sp5) has begun having a problem saving Excel files to a shared volume. He is able to save Word documents however. I have never seen a problem like this before. Here is what I know so far:

Both Word and Excel are running locally on his computer, not from a distributed server.
He has full rights (except Supervisor) to this volume.
The problem exists on any computer that he is logged in from.
Other users in his Netware group can save Word and Excel files with no problems.

Another strange symptom: attempts to rename a file on the volume fail the first try, but succeed if you try it a second time. In other words, from Windows explorer, right click a file on this volume, select rename, key in the new name and press Enter - get an error message "Unable to rename file". Click OK, type the new name in again, press Enter - file is renamed.

I have run DSREPAIR with no reported errors. There are no obvious reasons for this strange problem. This user has been on this server for several years and has only recently began experiencing the problem with his account.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

DJNafey · #2 (**permalink**) 08-01-2005, 02:11 AM

I do hope someone can help you with this but, to be honest, I feel that this might not be the best site for a Novell issue.

The only thought I've had on it is my one experience of Novell: when I went out on-site to install my company's software in one of our client's buildings, we had issues with long filenames because they were running Novell 4. That was several years ago and, even then, it was surprising that they were running an old version of Novell that was pretty out-of-date. Any chance it could be a long filename issue that you've got though? On a similar line of thinking, perhaps it could be a problem with the full path being too long (e.g. lots of subfolders)? I've also seen (though not necessarily on Novell) problems in the past with special characters in file or folder names, e.g. apostrophes, forward slashes, etc.

discgolfer · #3 (**permalink**) 10-01-2005, 03:40 PM

Thank you. I kind of thought that it might not be, but at a point of desperation I decided to try. It seems like I have found at least a short fix - turning off the File Caching setting in the client's advanced properties has gotten the user back up and running, but I'm not confident in this fix since every other computer in that department is configured identically. But again, thanks for taking the time to read and respond.