File locked by "another user"

Hi,
I am supporting a small office with 8x Windows 7 Pro 64x machines running Office 2007. They have a 2008 R2 DC which is also file server.
Recently we started getting the message that files are locked by "another user". This does not happen all the time and the files are not in use by anyone when it occurs. If a file is used by someone else it gives the user name in the error message.
They can try opening the file one moment and it fails, try again and it works fine. Sometimes it takes repeated tries or they have to open the file from within Excel (they usually just double click the file to open). I'm not sure if it happens with Word as
well, as they are a quite Excel heavy office.
I did some investigation online and a lot of the threats I found were related to Windows Defender - which my client was using. So I got rid of that and installed McAfee, which I liked much better anyway. Unfortunately that did not help and my client reports
that the incidences of locked files are getting more and more, to the point where they are quite annoyed.
In all honesty, I don't know where to start to get on top of this thing and would appreciate some guidance ;)
Thanks!
Maike
Here a screenshot I got, a little small - sorry!

Hi Maike,
Check if the following information would help:
There is a public blog on file locking issues (http://blogs.technet.com/b/the_microsoft_excel_support_team_blog/archive/2012/05/14/the-definitive-locked-file-post.aspx).
I would suggest the following:
If you are seeing problems where the file is locked when double clicking from Windows Explorer, but the files open up correctly when opened in Excel or Word, do the following:
Turn off the Preview Pane, Details Pane and pop ups that show information about file and desktop items
This is a problem that has been reported to affect Windows 7 clients only, not Windows XP. The problem here may have something to do with the Windows Explorer in Windows 7. We are currently investigating this further and will post more information as it is
available.
In a Windows Explorer window, do the following:
1. Right click on the Start Button.
2. Click 'Open Windows Explorer'.
3. At the top left click Organize > Layout
4. Uncheck Details Pane and Preview Pane.
5. On a Windows menu, click on Tools > Folder Options. In the box that opens up, click on the View tab. Scroll down the list to“Show pop-up description for folder and desktop items” and clear the checkbox and then click OK.
If you are seeing issues where the wrong user name is showing up, there is a known bug on that and a fix:
In cases where the wrong user name is displayed in the file lock dialog
Sometimes where it says 'another user' it has the name of someone that didn't open the file or it has no name at all. Just a big ' ' where a name ought to be. Fear not, there is a fix for this problem. The flavor depends on
whether you have Excel 2010 or Excel 2007. The below KB Articles contain hotfixes that address several issues, not just the file locked issue. But in the dialog of the article you will see this as one of the problem descriptions:
Assume that you have an .xls file that is protected by Information Rights Management (IRM) on a network share. When you open the file in Excel 2007, a File In Use dialog box appears. However, the dialog box does not display the
correct name of the user who locked the file. Therefore, you cannot edit the file.
Understand that these fixes don't make the File in Use dialog go away, they just correct the problem of showing bogus user name information on the dialog itself.
Excel 2007 -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2598133
Excel 2010 -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2598143
Will Buffington
Microsoft Excel Support
Max Meng
TechNet Community Support

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Problem with file locked by another user

I have a problem with a user on Windows 7 in my network when accessing a single .xlsx file. When Jane Smith opens said file, she gets a message that the file is locked by Jane Smith but she has checked and it was in use by another user, Roger Smith.
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example: they give two updates to download.
Excel 2007 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2598133
Excel 2010 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2598143
No option for 2013.
but this could be useful no matter the version.
In the Shared folder or the File Server;
Open the folder where the Document is located.
Click Tools=>Folder Options
Click the View tab
Scoll down to Advanced Settings>Hidden files and folders
Select Show hidden files and folders and Unselect Hide protected operating system files
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Hi,
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hi,
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I have an application using ADF, Java, Struts, JSP in JDev10.1.2
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Hi guys. Help me to hunt down a question.
Then I am trying to open or save a spreadsheet in excel 2007 it always shows me a downloading status bar without any progress. After few minutes the file opens or not. Game of chance. When it didn`t open I get this error message "file
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Hi,
I tried on a Windows 2008 R2 system and here is the result.
Here "2" is a standard domain user so it could be displayed correctly.
I would like to know if the issue specifically occurs on Office files? If so it could be an Office issue instead of system related. You can try one of the following 2 files:
Excel 2007 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2598133
Excel 2010 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2598143
If you have any feedback on our support, please send to [email protected]

Microsoft-Windows-Folder Redirection Error 502. CSC database locked by another user

Dear all,
We are finalizing our Windows 7 migration where we migrated 500+ clients. In our enterprise concept we implemented RUP (Roaming User Profiles) and Redirected Folders for all
users. The Redirected Folders have been by enabled by a single GPO which redirects all folders from
AppData to
Searches \\servername.domain.name\documents$\%username%.
Problem:
The RUP and Redirected folders solution works fine until a new user wants to logon. This new user has been migrated to RUP and Redirected on another system and
he just wants to work on another workplace or gets a temporary pc. What happens is that redirected folders do not work. The user gets a message that the folder is not reachable and desktop is empty.
Troubleshooting:
Soon I found out that something was being locked. If we used a user account which had working Redirect Folders than this
worked for that user. An event of 10 was logged in OfflineFiles area of EventViewer to reconnect the path which was configured in the GPO.
This is example screenshot. It says "Error on Open Folder. \\server.domain.name\documents$\%username%\Desktop refers to a location that is unavailable. It could be on a hard disk
on this computer, or a on a network. Check to make sure that the disk is properly inserted, or that you are connected to the Internet or your network, and then try again. If it still cannot be located, the information might have been moved to a different location."
These symptoms happen randomly and not on all workstations. The pain here is when it happens on a portable computer. For desktop we disabled the "Disable Offline Files' in "Manage
Offline Files" control panel and then reboot. After the reboot the folders are directed
and it works without these errors... On portable computer we can't use this work around as they need to work offline.
If I connect to the share without the FQDN like \\servername\documents$\%username%\Desktop than this works fine and user can access all folders. When I try the FQDN path which is
configured in the GPO to redirect user to like \\servername.domain.name\documents$\%username%\Desktop than it fails with this message. I personally think because the C:\Windows\CSC database is locked by the previous user who has been logged on this system.
An example of the event generated in the Applications Event viewer part (I removed some username and server path):
Log Name:      Application
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-Folder Redirection
Date:          1-2-2011 17:40:11
Event ID:      502
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:
User:          domain\ivan
Computer:      computer.domain.name
Description:
Failed to apply policy and redirect folder "Videos" to "\\servername.domain.name\documents$\ivan\Documents\My Videos".
Redirection options=0x1001.
The following error occurred: "Can not create folder "\\\servername.domain.name\documents$\ivan\Documents\My Videos"".
Error details: "Access is denied.
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
<System>
    <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-Folder Redirection" Guid="{7D7B0C39-93F6-4100-BD96-4DDA859652C5}" />
    <EventID>502</EventID>
    <Version>0</Version>
    <Level>2</Level>
    <Task>0</Task>
    <Opcode>0</Opcode>
    <Keywords>0x8000000000000000</Keywords>
    <TimeCreated SystemTime="2011-02-01T16:40:11.486983400Z" />
    <EventRecordID>2754</EventRecordID>
    <Correlation ActivityID="{3211E6FB-2801-456D-BE6E-66AAE150A4DC}" />
    <Execution ProcessID="968" ThreadID="5856" />
    <Channel>Application</Channel>
    <Computer>computer.domain.name</Computer>
    <Security UserID="S-1-5-21-3705223304-2632712944-1292073641-26755" />
</System>
<EventData Name="EVENT_FDEPLOY_FailedToApplyPolicy">
    <Data Name="FromFolder">Videos</Data>
    <Data Name="ToFolder">\\servername.domain.name\documents$\ivan\Documents\My Videos</Data>
    <Data Name="Options">0x1001</Data>
    <Data Name="Error">Can not create folder "\\servername.domain.name\documents$\ivan\Documents\My Videos"</Data>
    <Data Name="ErrorDetails">Access is denied.
</Data>
</EventData>
</Event>
Something like this I see in the Application Eventviewer:
Environment:
Windows 7 Enterprise client with patches until 1-Nov-2010
Windows Server 2008 R2 for the Documents$ share
Windows Server 2003 R2 as the domain controller
I have tried all different option even to rebuild the CSC database but this also was not helping. I hope we are not dealing with a bug.
Any help is much appreciated.
Best regards, Ivan Versluis http://www.networknet.nl

Ivan and SteveDIG - Thanks for taking the time to post detailed information about what you have found. I have found the same things over the past few months and have been working with Microsoft to resolve this. Like Ivan, I have been told by
MS that this is a design problem in Windows 7, but they did admit it is a bug and did not charge me for the case. That was the good news. The bad news was that the problem is so 'deep' in Windows 7 that it will not be fixed until Windows 8 and
the CSC engineering team in Redmond has rejected several requests to fix this issue in Windows 7 from several customers. I personally feel we should have hauled our TAM in over this, but that wasn't my call so we haven't attempted to get an attitude
change from MS.
<RANT> I find this completely outrageous. Windows is supposed to be a multi-user operating system suitable for deployment to mobile workforces spread around the world and often using slow VPN links. Offline folders, folder redirection,
slow link detection, etc. are all great on paper and as I did the design work for the W7 solution I've just built I sold these advantages heavily. I now have serious egg on my face and am not happy. Like others here I missed this in testing as
multiple users are a fringe for us, but still important, I unfortunately didn't think to specifically test for multiple users, though I tested the features thoroughly and was happy with the results when used on single user machines.</RANT>
As identified above, this issue manifests when more than one user uses a machine and their Offline folders (all redirected folders are configured this way by default) are in an offline state when the first user logs off. The second user cannot access
this 'offline' share so folder redirection fails. We get burnt as we have latency=0 configured for slow link detection with Offline folders so users always work offline. This is partly because of WAN optimisers in the network that lie to Windows
so the online/offline transition doesn't work on slow links (not MS's fault), and partly because it made sense for other reasons.
The workaround Microsoft and I came up with for our environment was to use individual file shares for each user. We had been using a common file share with each user folder under that file share. Changing to an individual share for each users
means the share is not locked by the previous user.
Examples
This would cause a problem if John then Emma logged on to the same machine. Folder redirection would fail for Emma:
\\FileServer1\Users$\john
\\FileServer1\Users$\emma
So would this if DFS was used
\\my.domain\users\john           (points to \\FileServer1\Users$\John)
\\my.domain\users\emma          (points to \\FileServer1\Users$\Emma)
This would fix the problem:
\\FileServer1\John$
\\FileServer1\Emma$
Unfortunately we then figured we could move these shares behind DFS like so:
\\my.domain\homes\john             (points to \\FileServer1\John$)
\\my.domain\homes\emma         (points to \\FileServer1\emma$)
This was wrong. The problem returned. I assume the share that is being locked is now the DFS root and not the user share.
The operations team here is very reluctant to go with direct access to the file servers and not use DFS as that will create issues for them in the future when they need to make file server changes. I sympathise with them but can't see an alternative
at the moment as we are deploying W7 and can't stop. If I'd picked this up earlier a third party product might have been the solution (MS actually suggested this when I opened my case).
I hope the information about individual shares above is helpful to someone. Otherwise I don't really have more to add but I needed the rant :-)
<RANT>BTW. Has anyone tested changing a user’s home directory path once it is cached? Try it. Test a scenario where you move the user from one file server to another. You will not enjoy the results. I'll say no more
than this as it is off topic, but it shows the lack of investment in the CSC feature in Windows. Very disappointing</RANT>

Cannot open .odc files created by another user - Unexpected error

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I asked a user to create another .odc file for the same data and they were able to save this into the connection library. However the same error occurs when I try to access this new file. The error I recieve is 'An unexpected error has occured. Changes to
your data cannot be saved'. I can open the connection files that I have created but not ones that others have.
I am only an end user so I don't have access to Central Administraion to configure the Unattended Account in the Excel Service Administration page as suggested in another post.
So is there any other way around this issue?
Thanks.

Hi,
An ODC file is just a txt file and can be opened with notepad to edit. A Data Connection Library needs to be Trusted via Central Administration, Manage Service Applications, Excel Services Application, Trusted Data Connection Libraries, Click Add Trusted
Data Connection Library. However, you should still be able to open someone else's ODC file unless its been saved as a draft?
-Ivan

RSPC chain locked by another user

hi folks - is there a way to get into an RSPC chain (display mode is fine - that's all i need) when another user already has that particular chain open in RSPC/RSPC1?
if someone already has the chain open i get a msg saying:
Object requested is currently locked by user ...
==
thanks

Hi,
When another user in the same process chain , you cant diplay the process chain . but you can get the details of process chain varaints and logs through function modules.
But we cant see the process chain when another user in same process chain , if you try to see the same process chain you will get message like ' Locked by user'. Regarding process chain job count , variant , log id and Ptypees details we can see through Function modules.
Regards,.
Krishna Reddy Yakkanti

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