Saving excel files corrupts file permissions

[Vachaun22]

I am thinking this may not be an office problem but a windows problem, but since it only happens when using excel, I am posting here....

There is a shared folder on the network with excel files (.xls not .xlsx) that people with newer versions of office have shared. Now I understand that when newer versions of excel saves files, it doesn't save over the old file, it deletes the original and copies the temp file to the name of the original.

I believe this is the point at which our issue occurs. The file that gets created gets corrupted permissions on it and is no longer available for others to use. In fact, it loses the owner GUID along with all the user permission GUIDs as well. So I have to go in and take ownership of the file again, and reapply the permissions. And then the next user saves and the same thing all over again.

Has anyone else seen this problem?

I am thinking that I might create a new directory, and copy all the files to it and remove the original just to see if it fixes anything....at this point I am at a loss as I have never seen this happen in over a decade as a sys admin.

 

[ChrisHirst]

You will need to go up a level on the network location and make sure that NTFS permissions and ownership are set to be inherited by the files and folders.

Chris.

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[Vachaun22]

The NTFS permissions are indeed set to inherited.

I thought it might be the AV grabbing an exclusive lock on the file as soon as the file is created when Excel copies the working temp file to the original file name during a save. But I disabled the AV and the incident still occurred.

I also turned auditing on for this particular folder. What I find interesting is that the System process (PID 4) is rewriting the permissions from the original permission set to essentially no permissions on the file at all.

At this point I feel as though I am chasing my own tail with the problem.

I ran a verify with SFC, which did give back some issues with file permissions on the system. I may try to find some down time on the system where I can run SFC on the system. I am starting to think that there may be some kind of file corruption somewhere that is causing the problems to occur.

Any thoughts on the issue are welcome. Thanks in advance.

 

[MakeItSo]

Just a wild shot here but have you tried adding that network share to your trusted locations in Excel?
See here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/trusted-documents-HA010354384.aspx#_Toc311644221

and here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/e...settings-in-the-trust-center-HA010354326.aspx

Add your network share to the trusted locations.

Good luck!
MakeItSo

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[Vachaun22]

I will certainly check trusted documents settings and give that a try.

At this point I have moved the files to a new directory with a different set of perms (a security group instead of 25 individual users), same issue.

Though now when the users save, the System service (PID 4) resets the permissions to only include the administrator account.

So it seems to be something on the server that is changing the permissions for some reason. And I have yet to determine what this might be.

 

[Vachaun22]

Ok, so update on the situation....

There are 3 machines that I am working with to test this problem out....

All 3 running Windows 7 Pro x64 as domain members
All 3 running Office 2010

1 machine has been in place for a few months
1 machine was put in place last week
The machine I am working on has been running for a few months

The machine I work on, I can open/save the spreadsheet all day long without affecting permissions. I have no issues whatsoever.

The other 2 machines, as soon as they save the document, permissions are wiped clean.

I initially thought it was user privileges on the machine, but I have regular user (no admin) and another user has no admin, while the third has local admin. I have no issues, the other 2 do.

The two machines with the problem are located closer physically to the server than I am, and should are working off the same physical network switch. My machine must travel through at least 2 switches and a wireless bridge...

None of the machines have had any configuration changes done to Office from the way it is configured at installation time. At this point I am banging my head against the wall as to why these other machines are having the issue, but I cannot replicate it on my machine...