[Samba] oplocks and Excel

[Matt Morgan]

I have a small business client with a new samba file server. It's
CentOS 4.2 and Samba samba-3.0.10-1.4E.2.

When they save open Excel files from Windows, they are prompted to
overwrite the existing file. I mean, when they click the little disk
icon or use Ctrl-S or File--Save. Excel would normally just write over
the file, not check with an "are you sure?" prompt. But that's what
they get.

So I looked into this a little, and although I can't find anyone with
this specific issue, I do see that newer versions of Excel create a
bit of file-locking trouble for samba. Now, I don't know enough to
know whether my problem has anything to do with file-locking, but it
seems likely enough. So I have two questions:

1) I find very conflicting opinions on this list, and across the net,
about whether to leave oplocks and level2 oplocks on. I have never had
to touch them in the past, but most of the places where I've used
samba have old versions of Excel and/or OOo. If this place does not
use much MS-Access, can I turn off oplocks? Might I expect doing so to
help with this prompt-to-overwrite problem?

2) More generally, has anyone else seen this problem before and been
able to do anything about it?

Thanks,
Matt