I manage IT for a medium sized company that shares a lot of Excel 2010 files between users at various times of the day. We're using a Terminal Server environment (S2008R2).
Sometimes, a user will try to open an Excel file and get the message that the file is locked by %user% (it names the user) with the "Read Only", "Notify", "Cancel" options, but that user isn't even logged in to the domain.
Today, I had one user try to open an Excel file that said it was locked by a user that hasn't been with the company for 5 weeks. The user's AD account was disabled weeks ago. The server has even been rebooted since then.
How is this possible, and how can I stop this from happening?
Best Answer
It happens. If a user doesn't properly close a file (workstation reboot, TS session crashed) then Windows stills sees the file as open. You can close the files from the File Management console on the file server. If you don't see the files listed as open you may need to reboot the file server to release the lock.
To help prevent this in the future you can instruct the users on how to close all of their applications and open files before when quitting work for the day.