I have an imac g5 running OSX10.4 and Office 2004, networked to a G4DP Server (OSX10.3 Server). When saving a word document on to the server the following message appears "There has been a network or file permission error. The Network connection may be lost. (filename.doc)". This only happens on this g5 (we have 14 on a network) and it tends to only happen after 5pm (wierd!), and it is not isolated to one particular document. I have had our Mac guy (who is very competent) try and sort it (including a hard disk reformat and rebuild) and he is still scratching his head. This issue is driving me crazy, and the operator is pulling her hair out! Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.... Grant South Australia

Microsoft Office 2004 11.2.1 (#7): More on "Network or file permission error" -- potential fixes We continue to report on issue where, when saving Word 2004 documents to a server, Word will sporadically return the following error: "There has been a network or file permission error. The network connection may be lost." It appears that in many instances of this issue, the problem has to do with the way that Microsoft Word (and other Office applications) write temporary files, then transfer that information into an actually saved file. When the user is working on a document, Word and other Office apps save temporary file to to the top level of the active startup directory. The information in that file is later transferred to the actual saved document when the user invokes the "Save" or "Save as" command. The problem occurs when there is some interruption with this transfer process. This can be the result of a permissions problem, or a potential flaw in the way that Mac OS X's networking components traverse across filesystems to save files. As such, a common environment for manifestation of these problems is a situation where client users are using network-based home directories. Word and other Office applications attempt to create temporary files at the top directory on the startup device, then have a problem transferring that information across filesystems to the user's home directory. MacFixIt reader Burk Roberts writes: "It appears to me that the problem is more widespread in environments with networked home folders. However, all our users have local homes and we use an AFP sharepoint where we save all our current work. (This setup gives us our workaround: "Save As..." to the local user's desktop, and after editing is complete manually drag the file to the correct location on the sharepoint.) Microsoft tells me they've heard of the problem occurring on Panther machines, but we never saw it until we migrated to Tiger and the problem seems to be much more prevalent among Tiger users." Another MacFixIt reader documented his experience with one variant of the issue in a series of blog postings, concluding: http://systemsboy.blogspot.com/2005/09/tiger-lab- migration-part-8-home.html "Some of our problems were related to a particular brand of home account server, some seem to be application- or NFS-specific. I have a blog in which I documented the entire experience, including fixes. It's quite lengthy, and starts off a little wrong-headed. It's hard to know if any of this will be useful to anyone. But, for what it's worth, we were able to fix these problems." Matthew L. Nilles provides some additional data points, noting that deletion of specific .plist files (including the com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist file, located in ~/Library/ Microsoft/) temporarily solves the problem. "I am having this exact problem with one of my network users on only one of my iMac G5s (There has been a network or file permission error. The network connection may be lost). I run a small network for my research lab (~12 users, 5 iMac G5's, the server is a dual G4 tower running 10.4.3 Server), all the iMac G5s have Tiger 10.4.3 and the latest version of Office. What i find puzzling is that user with the problem only has it on one of the iMacs, when he logs into the others everything is fine. He also has a recurring issue where the Word documents that he opens, open as read only. Again this only occurs on the same iMac, the same documents open fine on the other iMacs in the lab. I am completely baffled by what to do, I have fixed permissions and checked the permissions on his files and the Office folder and Word, as far as I can tell the permissions settings on the problem iMac are the same as they are on the non-problem iMacs. I deleted all the Microsoft and word .plist files I could find in his Preferences folder, this seemed to temporarily fix the read-only issue and allowed some documents to save once, then the problem recurred." Tom Neale reports another case in which networked home folders are a factor "I have a school computer lab with both Panther and Tiger clients connected to a Tiger server which hosts all users' home folders. "When a Tiger client tries to save a Word 2004 file to the user's network-mounted home folder it works, the first time. Any subsequent saves result in an error something like "Error: the file could not be saved, the file is open elsewhere." The same problem occurs after opening an existing document, modifying it and trying to save it. "The only option remaining is to perform a Save As and give it a new name. Tom also corroborates other data indicating that this problem is Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger)-specific: "None of this occurs on the 10.3 clients, they can save normally. But they are all so old and slow (Rev A and B G3 iMacs) that Office 2004 is pretty much unusable. Aaron Willems laments the issue further "T recently upgraded all my Production clients to Tiger. We also have a Brand new Xserve with Xraid running Tiger Server. All of my Production Staff have been reporting the famous, 'There has been a network or file permission error. The network connection may be lost.', issue when using Word 2004. I thought the problem might be with the Tiger Server installation. I was dreading the idea of coming in on Saturday, to do a clean install of OS X Server. Well, I guess I'm either going to have downgrade clients to Panther, or tell them to wait for a fix. Microsoft needs to fix this problem right away. We are a Multi-Million dollar company that is 95% Mac based. We don't have time for stuff like this." Potential fix Again, in most instances of this issue, the problem occurs when Word stores temporary files at the top level of the current startup volume. It seems that when traversing across a network volume to transfer data from a temporary file to a normal data file (using the "Save" command), an error is encountered. As such, one potential fix (though it introduces a security issues) is to give all client users write access to the top level of the connected server volume (mounted on the client) -- this is where Word and other apps write their temporary files. MacFixIt reader G. Magee notes a caveat to this solution, however: "Once a mounted server volume (folder) becomes corrupted, changing the write access permissions (for that folder) may not fix the problem (it didn't for me). I had to move the contents of the corrupted folder on the server to a newly created folder (with write access for clients). That fixed it for all users."

Thanks, great advice The fix.... I have de installed Office 2004 and reinstalled OfficeX and the problem has disappeared (but I can't run Office 2004!!). Hopefullly this issue will be sorted by Apple and Microsoft Many Thanks Grant South Australia