Office 2010 & Windows 7 – ‘File’ is currently in use. Try again later

microsoft-office-2010windows 7

The issue: when saving a document from either Word, Excel or PowerPoint 2010, every so often it will show the message 'file' is currently in use. Try again later.

We started our rollout of Windows 7 beginning of this year, and this issue was infrequent, but is now affecting enough people to be a problem.

Usually, if you clear the alert, then save again, it works fine, though only in Word or Excel. Annoyingly, PowerPoint has a bad habit of changing the file to read-only after the error. So the only choice is to save to a new file name.

The issue seems to only happen to files in the user's My Documents, which is a redirection folder from their HomeShare.

The HomeShares are spread across 3 different file servers, 2 Windows 2003 and 1 Windows 2008 R2.

Has anyone seen this issue and know how to fix it?

Best Answer

One of the more common causes of this is anti-virus locking the file during scans.

Make sure that you're running a version that is supported on Windows 7 and 2008 R2.

Make sure that your clients are set to ignore scanning of network folders (your servers should be scanning files on themselves, the clients shouldn't be scanning over the network).

If you can exclude a directory that is commonly problematic, but that you believe to be safe, that would be a good test to see if it still manifests.

If all else fails, grab a copy of handle.exe from the sysinternals suite and check what has an open handle to the file on the server.

Related Solutions

Office 2007 running under Windows 7 is slow to save files to network

I am going to assume your network connection is just fine, and you are local to the server (i.e not VPN'ing in). You didn't specify whether this was just yourself, or everybody having the issue, however that is pretty irrelevant to my answer.

I've seen Office hang for a while on save and/or print dialog boxes when you have either a network printer which is no longer in service, or mapped network drives pointing to non-existent/unavailable servers.

Is it just Office which is slow to save, or any application? Try opening Notepad and attempting to save to the same file server. Also, when doing a \\SERVERNAME, can you browse the share(s) relatively quickly?

If you have physical access to the server or can RDP to it, fire up Task Manager and check you've not got something eating away all of the CPU. While you're in Task Manager, check the memory usage isn't excessive too.

SBS2011 SharePoint 2010 – Word/Excel prompting for password

Have you tried using the following registry value? This usually works with integrated authentication (not basic/forms authentication).

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters  
Value: AuthForwardServerList  
Type: Multi-string

Refer to the following document for more information:

Prompt for Credentials When Accessing FQDN Sites
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943280

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Office 2007 running under Windows 7 is slow to save files to network

SBS2011 SharePoint 2010 – Word/Excel prompting for password

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