Ms Word hangs if opening file in Shared Folder

[SoSa11]

I made a search and found no topic dealing with this issue. Sorry if it has been discussed.

Switched from Parallels 3.0 yesterday. So far i am really impressed with fusion, i had smaller problems but have been able to sort them out with the exception of this:

If I open a .doc file within the Virtual Machine, Ms. Word 2003 works fine. If i do the same (open a file) in one of the Shared folders Ms Word freezes solid immediately. I am not able to kill it from Task Manager, there is not response with the exception of XP trying to send home an error report.

The only way to stop Word is to restart XP.

I made several attempts with the same result.

I am new, it can be somehow i messed up something, but would appreciate if somebody could give me an idea what i did wrong.

[admin]

It's quite possible this is not your fault. Please file a bug[/url] to help the developers track the issue.

[aliasme]

Problem: Shared folders are very hard to work with at the moment --- they lock-up, pause, crash applications. I don't completely trust them right now when moving files around.

Solution: In an explorer window, go to tools, map network drive and map the share to a local drive letter. Working with the share through a mapped network drive eliminates the problems: pausing when opening the window, freezing when copying files, freezing when navigating the underlying share, crashes when certain applications access file attributes in the underlying share, crashes when files are working with content inside the file.

In Fusion:

Shared Folders: Enabled

Name: Windows

Path: /Volumes/Windows

In Windows:

Map Network Drive

Drive: W:

Folder:
.host\Shared Folders\Windows

Reconnect at logon: Optional, but it works fine and saves time with permanent shares

Note: .host is literally .host, not a placeholder for your machine name (.macdaddy)

[SoSa11]

Problem: Shared folders are very hard to work with at

the moment --- they lock-up, pause, crash

applications. I don't completely trust them right

now when moving files around.

Solution: In an explorer window, go to tools, map

network drive and map the share to a local drive

letter. Working with the share through a mapped

network drive eliminates the problems: pausing when

opening the window, freezing when copying files,

freezing when navigating the underlying share,

crashes when certain applications access file

attributes in the underlying share, crashes when

files are working with content inside the file.

In Fusion:

Shared Folders: Enabled

Name: Windows

Path: /Volumes/Windows

In Windows:

Map Network Drive

Drive: W:

Folder:
.host\Shared Folders\Windows

Reconnect at logon: Optional, but it works fine and

saves time with permanent shares

Note: .host is literally .host, not a placeholder for

your machine name (.macdaddy)

aliasme: Thank you, your solution seems to solve the problem.

Once more: many thanks..

[admin]

Also, I'm sure you've already tried this, but I wanted to verify that the same[/i] doc file that freezes Fusion when opened from a shared folder will open fine from a normal folder. Does this happen with any doc file, or just certain ones? Do you have a small doc file that triggers this freeze that you'd be willing to share?

[SoSa11]

Yes, the same .doc file works perfectly if copied to one of the Virtual Machine folders.

I try to attach the file in questions. (It is in Hungarian, but I do not think that matters.)

My XP and Office 2003 is International English

[Pat_Lee]

Very weird, I am opening all sorts of documents from my Mac drive using Shared Folders including Word, Excel and PDF and they all work fine in opening the Windows applications.

Is it only this word file? I am quite curious.

Thanks,

Pat

[SoSa11]

First i was suspicious, that the problem is with non-English characters in the document title. Then i tried with other (English) files, and MS Word freezes solid. They all work well if copied to VM folders.

Now i try other (PDF, Powerpoint files) and in a couple of minutes report back.

[SoSa11]

PDF opens without a hitch.

Word and Powerpoint files are freezing their corresponding applications.

[steve_goddard]

When you say teh Office application freezes, at what point?

Can you describe or upload a screen shot?

I am trying to reproduce this on my Mac and have tried your

word document and it loads fine, also tried to other word

docs both sizeable has ~60 pages, and worked too.

I am running a debug version of the client driver.

I will try again using the shipping build.

[SoSa11]

There is another thing: I made my Shared Folder Read-only.

Now everything works beautifully. Something must have been with my OSX access rights.

[SoSa11]

The files started Office applications OK. After the intro screen i got the page view, but instead of drawing the document page the screen remained gray and froze.

[admin]

So it works if the shared folder is read-only but not if it's read/write? What are the permissions on that directory (go to a terminal and type 'ls -l shared-folder; ls -ld shared-folder') when it's working and when it's not?

[SoSa11]

s -l:

drwx-wx-wx 4 SoSa SoSa 136 Jun 4 16:07 Drop Box

s -ld:

drwxr-xr-x 5 SoSa SoSa 170 Jun 4 16:06 /Users/SoSa/Public/

in both cases.

[Build_Interns]

Hey guys.

In my opinion, I would have to say MSN SUCKS! I would suggest that you use OpenOffice! Simply because it is OPEN SOURCE like VMWARE Also if OpenOffice can open up all your .doc files so you dont have to worry!

[admin]

o.O

...I don't know how to begin responding to that post.

[Build_Interns]

If you are dis-satisified with OpenOffice than you can always try StarOffice.

I wouldn't reccommend StarOffice however, simply because SOLARIS sux!!!11

[steve_goddard]

So I have the Beta 4 fusion release, installed the tools from a fresh

start, so ensuring any previous versions were removed.

I have a network drive mapped to my
.host\Shared Folders

I go through Explorer.exe to the drive and run under Public

share which maps to my \Users\steve\Public

and loaded powerpoint slides, word docs including the one from here,

excel spreadsheets and even wmv movies. No problem with

any of them.

The share is enabled read/write as I can create new copies of the

files.

I can go through the cmd.exe to the same location on my network

drive and run the files and office applications load and load the

file too.

I even used explorer.exe to
.host\Shared Folders\Public and

double clicked the relevant office files and again all worked.

I even have the same permissions on those directories of Public

and DropBox that you listed (except obviously my user was my own).

[steve_goddard]

Okay, more informational questions:

1) What is the VM operating system that you have installed?

2) Do you any anti-virus or file backup or file replication type

products installed in the VM operating system?

3) Would it be possible for you to manually force a crash dump?

there is a registry setting to allow you to do this using a specific

key combination. If you are willing to do this I will add the

required steps. It will involve checking that you can create

a "Complete Memory Dump" too. Once you have it maybe

we can compress it and upload that.

Thanks.

[SoSa11]

There is an interesting discussion going on in another topic in this forum:http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=88511&tstart=0

Fusion Beta 4 crash while writing to shared folders)

They say that avast antivirus causes crash while writing to shared folders. I did not mention that i also use avast antivirus.

It may well be that is my problem: Word crashes when tries to write back to shared folders, that is why opening files read-only works fine.

So it nothing to do with access rights, the culprit is avast antivirus.