[valis]

figured you guys were getting bored without some 'out of left field questions', so I thought I'd better step it up a notch.

Get an error opening certain word or excel documents. Not all documents, mind you, just certain ones. The error is 'The document name or file path is not valid. Try these suggestions.', for certain word items, and 'The file in question is locked or you don't have the necessary permissions' or some such (not sure on the wording on the second one) for the excel items.

Again, these are hit and miss. Only problem is, two of the hits are files that I use extremely frequently, one being my hjt log speeches, and the other being our weekly budget that I update daily. I've got the excel one fixed (have backups all over the place), but can't get the .doc one to work yet. I've got several workarounds in place, so it's not a big deal, but still curious as to why one document in a folder will not open, yet all the other .doc's will with no problem. Tried changed directory, making sure I'm the owner, making sure it's not read-only, making sure it's set to 'open with', etc.

Nada.

No new software, no new hardware, no new anything. Just those files up an quit. I've googled the error on Word, got zilch. Haven't reset normal.dot yet, as other .doc's open up, and I've got word pretty tweaked, so I'd rather not delete normal.dot unless I have to. Got a backup of that, but it's about 6 months old.

any further questions, give a holler.

tia,

v

[OBP]

valis, are you opening the Word Docs from within Word, via a shortcut or double clicking the file?

[valis]

all three. And I've eliminated the normal.dot issue as it's replicated over two pc's with different .pip or .dot files. For all intents and purposes, it's now solved, as I had a back up of my hjt cans at work, and a back up of my budget spreadsheet at home, so no data was lost, but I'm still rather confused as to why it would happen like that, quite literally out of the blue. I was working in both on Sunday, and on Monday neither wanted to play nice. Disk check turned up squat, checking external drive now.

[OBP]

No microsoft downloads in the background?

[valis]

Nope. Two different machines, too. One is a home rig, one's the more constrained work rig.

[slurpee55]

Hmm, I have had that problem when the complete address of the file, including the name of the file, exceeds a certain length - 215 characters, I think it is.
For instance, this would not open for me:
\\servername.companyname.local\DataStorage\Work In Progress\2008 Projects\9999-Some very long name that I have rewritten for confidentiality\DATA\DATA, INSTR, FOR, BAN - FINAL\For SPSS\Q2\9999 filename something or other q2.xls

[valis]

yeah, had that one a few years back when someone couldn't insert a .jpg into a powerpoint file; turned out that they had it buried about 70 directories south of my docs.

The odd thing is that when I got the backup, placed them both in the same folder, the backup opens fine; the bad one errors out and doesn't even write anything to the eventlog.

That's the work pc. The home pc does it with my budget excel sheet; put the good one next to the bad one (remember, the backup is simply the latest version copied over) and try to open it, and *splat*.

I'm leaning very heavily towards something going sideways during the synch operation. That's the only way I can explain it happening on both pc's with different apps and files.

I'm going to attach a copy of the bad file that has had all the data removed; were I to attach the entire doc, it would exceed the limit. First let me submit it to jotti to ensure it's clean, then I'll post it here, see if anyone can open it.

thanks,

v

[valis]

from jotti:

 File:  	 hjt_dl.doc
Status: 	
OK
MD5: 	7cafa4b333f911ea221f8d01189f0608

 A-Squared  	
Found nothing
AntiVir 	
Found nothing
ArcaVir 	
Found nothing
Avast 	
Found nothing
AVG Antivirus 	
Found nothing
BitDefender 	
Found nothing
ClamAV 	
Found nothing
CPsecure 	
Found nothing
Dr.Web 	
Found nothing
F-Prot Antivirus 	
Found nothing
F-Secure Anti-Virus 	
Found nothing
Fortinet 	
Found nothing
Ikarus 	
Found nothing
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 	
Found nothing
NOD32 	
Found nothing
Norman Virus Control 	
Found nothing
Panda Antivirus 	
Found nothing
Sophos Antivirus 	
Found nothing
VirusBuster 	
Found nothing
VBA32 	
Found nothing

attached find the modded file with the data out.

scratch that, once I deleted the data from it in wordpad, and saved it, it opened fine.

word must not like some of the content. But that doesn't answer the question as to why the identical file I had copied on my network share at work works fine.

oh well, I'll mark it solved, and if anyone thinks of something, let me know.

Windows. Sheesh.

[slurpee55]

Must be all the "bad words" you were using, Valis....

[valis]

they are not bad, they are 'power' words.....