Microsoft Apps All Messed Up

[Alan Fahrner]

Hi Folks...

Just looking for a pointer.  I've written previously about some goofy stuff
I ran into when dealing with creating/modifying/executing files in a
directory mounted on a AIX samba server from a client NT 4.0 Workstation.
Thanks to those who wrote.  It worked out to be a combo of a known non-8.3
pathnames in 16 bit executables, and -- I figured out by some trial and
error -- an NT 4.0 workstation problem with oplocks.

However I have a bigger issue, that has the one super-annoying symptom that
the previous problems mentioned had -- It's fine with Win95 clients but
hosed with NT 4.0 Workstations.

Basically, everything now works fine in notepad (where I had done my testing
up to now.  However, although creating/opening/modifying Office docs with a
Win95 client on the server is fine, it always fails with the NT 4.0 machines
(various messages -- file not found in Word -- either can't read or can't
open in Excel -- even weirder messages in Access).  The one exception that I
get is that I can open an Excel file if I set it to read-only (I have not
tested this with Word or Access).

With debug at 3, it appears to me that Excel spends a lot of time opening
and closing and opening and closing the same file over and over again from
the NT 4.0 Workstation.  When I continue to fight with the issue while
testing, I even end up getting the NT password prompt, and the log says it
couldn't get any more connections.

So...any pointers?  I'm willing to do research, just need a jump start :-)

I found nothing searching through the digests.

As a side note, the failure with the oplocks and the NT 4.0 Workstation
isn't limited to when it connects to a samba server.  We had to edit the
registry on our NT servers to turn off access to oplocks because the first
Microsoft Office files that started getting created there were getting all
messed up to (lucky for me I had already run into this in samba).

Sorry 'bout the length of this one.  Thanks for your help.

Alan
alan at chelz.com