Offline Files has been such an issue in my office that we have had to turn it off, but even in turning if off there are more issues. Also, when Offline Files are turned off, we loose the flexibility with our laptops of being able to work on files located on the server even when not connected to the network. The issues we have experienced are as follows: 1) With Offline Files turned on, disks access (especially for files on a network server) is excruciatingly slow. Even with it turned off disk access in Windows 7 is slower than Windows XP, but it is much better with Offline Files turned off. 2) Windows Explorer has locked up when renaming files when Offline Files is turned on. I have not experienced this with Offline Files turned off. 3) We have had issues with Windows locking files on a server that have been accessed by a workstation, and the only way to access them again is to reboot the workstations that accessed those files. Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to fully track down this issues, and I am not yet sure if turning off Offline Files will resolve it. I included it in this list because it is one of the funky file access issues we have experienced with Windows 7. 4) Offline Files adds files to by synchronized even if you have not requested those files to be offline. When I viewed my Offline Files there were files included there which I did not request to be available offline. 5) When I tried to delete those extra offline files, Windows would not delete all of them. No matter what I tried I could not remove some of the files and folders from Offline Files -- again these were files that I did not request to have available offline. 6) Sync was failing because it could not access some of the files that it thought it should synchronize, and instead of just skipping that file it would stop the synchronization. Which leads to 7 7) Because the synchronization was failing the server was not getting updated with the current version of the files. This was discovered when we turned off Offline Files and people lost current versions of their files. I managed to recover them by turning Offline Files back on. Copying the "Offline Files" to a new location (to a hard drive on the workstation). Then turning Offline Files back off, and copying the files back to the server. This would not be a huge issue to me if it was only my computer. We are experiencing these issues on all four of our machines that are running Windows 7. Three of them are new machines from Dell that came with Windows 7, and the fourth is a machine that used to have Windows XP on it. Part of the issue could be that our server is running SBS 2003 (we hope to be upgrading that soon), but it should not be a server issue -- actually is should not be an issue at all in a properly functioning OS. I have started a thread before on one of these issues, but there has been no response. I am monitoring a similar issue in a second thread, but the answer given was that is is not Microsoft's problem, it was because the AV was scanning the network files. This is not an acceptable answer! It is not an AV issue, and, anyway, I want my AV to scan ALL OF THE FILES I open on my workstation. I don't even know what information to provide to help resolve this issue, but I am more than happy to answer questions. James Hannum

I have these two problems of yours, these were noticed after I visited a user that couldn't see a spreadsheet on a Network drive at all, and discovered that another 6 users were all looking at different versions of the same excel spreadsheet.. 4) Offline Files adds files to by synchronized even if you have not requested those files to be offline. When I viewed my Offline Files there were files included there which I did not request to be available offline. 5) When I tried to delete those extra offline files, Windows would not delete all of them. No matter what I tried I could not remove some of the files and folders from Offline Files -- again these were files that I did not request to have available offline. This appears to be a slow network issue, with machines auto caching files, at least for the 6 that have different copies.... The one user that cannot see the file at all, still cannot see the files, despite offline files being disabled and the rogue copy of the spreadsheet she can't see in the network location being deleted from Sync centre...