I've discovered a strange quirk, and not sure if it's office 2007 specifically related, or if it's Windows 7 related, but thought I'd post the question here. In our environment, we have redirected My Documents to a network location via group policy, and made My Documents available offline. This works great, and has since Windows XP for us. Here's the problem: Seemingly, ONLY .xls files have this issue. When a user opens a .XLS (office 2003 formatted excel file) in Excel 2007, windows throws that file from online mode to offline mode. This does NOT occur for .XLSX files. What this amounts to is users make changes to xls files on their computers, and expect those changes to follow them, as they all know their My Documents is redirected to a network share. When then go to another computer, the file changes are NOT synced, and you can only imagine how frustrating that is. The user must come back to their workstation, right click on the XLS file (the only one in that folder that shows offline) and click "Sync Selected Offline Files" in order to flip it back to online mode. This issue is reproducable on all Win7 / Excel 2007 pc's in our environment. Why does this only happen with XLS files, and no other files whatsoever. Users can edit DOC files, TXT files, etc, etc, without a problem. Any insight would be appreciated.

Further testing: This problem appears to be WORSE with Office 2003 editing it's own file format. For instance, If I edit a word .doc file, it flips into offline mode, and then if I open the network folder on another computer, it's been deleted from the network folder. When I go back to the original computer, if I manually sync the offline file, I get a sync conflict telling me it was deleted from the location, and do i either want to copy it back, or delete the local offline copy. THIS IS SCARY! Office 2010 is impacted the same way as office 2007 is, but office 2003 is the worst scenario. YIKES! I have reproduced this on multiple machines.

Hi, Thanks for posting in Technet. Antivirus and firewall programs is one of the possible root cause. If the issue persists after you disabling antivirus, please let us know what is the system of the server computer which shares the folder for profile redirection. If it is Windows Server 2003, I suggest you change the default NTLM authentication level in Windows 7. 1. Open gpedit.msc from Start Search box. Then locate to the following policy. 2. Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\Network security: LAN Manager authentication level 3. Please change “Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”. How does Office 2010 beta work in this case. You can download trail version in order to test. Office Products - Microsoft Office I just suspect that there are issues with SMB2 protocol and older Office programs. You can try to disable SMB2 on Windows 7 computer and check the result. To disable SMB2, please use the following commands. sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/nsi sc config mrxsmb20 start= disabled Please note: there's an extra " " (space) after the "=" sign. Regarding the offline sync behavior, the sync process will not be processed right after you change files. Understanding offline files It indicates: •If you are working offline and make changes to offline files from a network folder, Windows will automatically sync any changes you made to the files the next time you connect to that network folder. •If you are working offline while someone else changes files in a shared network folder, Windows will sync those changes with the offline files on your computer the next time you connect to that network folder. If you have also changed the files since you last connected to the network folder, a sync conflict will occur and Windows will ask you which version you want to keep. Arthur Xie TechNet Subscriber Support in forum If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com.Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Thanks for your response. I will try your suggestions shortly. About the sync behavior, you said "the sync process will not be processed right after you change files." That actually IS or SHOULD be the case when you're working online. When I edit or make changes in any other program aside from Office, this is never a problem (or at least not that I've ever noticed, or had clients tell me). The problem is that the one specific file you're editing gets flipped into offline mode... then never flips back to online mode. And since it flips to offline mode, your statement about it not syncing right away makes sense... but I shouldnt be in offline mode anyways! If I didn't have offline files enabled, it would have the file open on the network share.. but for some reason office never seems to actually edit the online file when you DO have offline files enabled, even work you're working ONLINE. I'll let you know the outcome of some of this troubleshooting. Thanks,

None of the above suggestions worked, regardless of where the share is hosted. We have some shares on server 2003, 2008, and IBM NSeries. All do the same thing. As I test further along with different versions of office, and different versions of XLS, XLSX, etc files created in each version, I'm coming to the conclusion it's definately in the way Office itself is dealing with these files.

That may be the problem. If you can confirm the facts after testing, I suggest you post this question to our Office forum to see if there is any helpful information. Excel IT Pro Discussions ForumPlease remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

@Newalloy: We have the same issue at one of our customers. Did you found a solution for this behavior? Regards Patrik

We were seeing very similar behaviour with *.xls files - Windows 7 SP1, Office 2010 SP1. If the *.xls file had been made available offline, it would save offline even when connected to the network. The registry fix in this KB article seems to have worked for us: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974070 (Obviously changing the reg path from 12 to 14 to reflect Office 2010 rather than 2007).