Network Timeout freezes InDesign

Question

A Win7 SP1 64bit PC is running InDesign CS5, and while working on a file, a user experienced a "network connection" error, and then InDesign froze, with no chance of recovery.
Is there any way to prevent ID from freezing when a network timeout issue occurs?
Why does it need to freeze anyway?  Why can't it simply halt whatever task it was trying to perform?

Answer 1

I think there is no question, scientifically or unscientifically, that we see far more reports of file corruption with networks than without.
Networks are complicated beasts, and they have many more possibly failure points than local disks do. (On the other hand, people with network storage are much more likely to have reliably backups; at least that's been true historically before the advent of both popular Internet-based backup and Apple's Time Machine). It's also the case that medium to large sites work almost exclusively with networks (though they may use database-driven document storage for which the traditional InDesign network-averse guidance may not apply), and they tend to deal with more documents than individuals do.
I think the single most definitive point in your favor of your position is this text from the CS5 help, Recommended workflow for InDesign documents:
You
can improve performance and prevent many problems by establishing
a good workflow to use with Adobe InDesign.
Open documents locally
Before you open
a document stored on a network volume or on removable media, copy
the document and any linked graphics to your local hard disk. The slower
access time and data transfer rate of a network volume or removable media
can cause data to become lost or corrupted, possibly damaging the document.
However, be aware of overriding someone else’s work if you copy
the local files back to a network server.
But that doesn't say networks are unsupported, it just says they may not be good.
But the person who wrote this was hopelessly naïve — network are a critical part of any modern business computer setup that is larger in scope than a sole proprietorship. And anyworkflow that expects users to copy files off the network to local disk and back is patently ludicrous. As the above acknowledges, copying them back is frought with peril.
Furthermore, the operating system vendors have expended no small effort to make networks mroe and more seamless and well-integrated, and to try to make them nearly indistiguishable from local disk—except. Except when they don't. Except when they can't. Except when applications need to know more about the underlying substrate of the filesystem, need better timing information, need to do things like memory-map files into RAM with guaranteed perforamance, etc. Though I am a bit skeptical that InDesign has any such needs...
Probably a good summary comes from a John Nack (Photoshop evangelist) blog post from 2008 (and networks have only become more popular), where he quotes an unnamed Adobe engineer, http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/06/filesaving_issu.html:
Directly writing to a network filing system adds a level of complexity,
which includes timing issues, network noise, performance, and other
potential issues. We’ve occasionally run into bugs with different
configurations/combinations, but as there are too many variants for us
to reliably test and certify all the clients, servers, hardware and
software, we recommend the safer course of working with files locally
and then copying them up to a file server when you’re done. While
directly reading/writing to network file systems should work in theory,
and while we do some limited testing in the most popular configurations
to verify that it does, we can not certify that it will work reliably in
your configuration.
But, of course, what do we mean by "support"? I am, by the way, interpretting your statement "not designed for working over networks," as "networks are not supported," and that may not be fair of me.
To me, "supported" means there is a reasonable expectation of the software working in the scenario, that Adobe will address bugs raised to them over the issue (rather than closing bugs saying, "at your own risk, sorry, bub!"), and Adobe will make a reasonable effort to keep it working. I think the situation with networks does qualify.
Unfortunately, it's hard to find anyone to say so. In part, I think, because there are so many variables nobody wants to be pinned down saying "it'll work" because you'll always eventually be able to point to a case where it won't. And the above blog post (part I didn't quote) talks about how a problem is really due to a bad interaction with Adobe product and MacOS X 10.5.3, which was later fixed by Apple.
Anyhow, we can also find plenty of evidence of Adobe having accepted and fixed bugs that relate to network behavior in InDesign. So I'm pretty confident that network use of InDesign si well-supported. But I certainly wouldn't say it was rock solid.
Hmm, this is kind of long. I will address the OP's issues in a seperate post.