Office (2016) files not opening on Windows 10 (1803)

[MrMDStreet]

My network manager has posted on another site this very weird problem we are having:

 

"Hi all, I'm mostly just thinking out loud here but would really appreciate any thoughts. Since Monday 25 Feb a handful (8 out of 250) users have been experiencing an issue opening Office files (Word, Excel and Powerpoint) from a network share. The share in question their network home folder, to which their Documents folder has been redirected. If Office files are opened from other network drives (mappings) or shares (UNC paths) then the problem does not present itself. The error is 'sorry, we couldn't find \\server\path\file name is it possible it was moved, renamed or deleted. However, attempting to open the file again, immediately after receiving the error, will allow the file to be opened. The clients are all Windows 10 1803. They are either using Office 2016 Pro Plus or Office 365 Pro Plus, no permissions have changed on the network share and the users can browse the entire path. If I move their docs back to local machine and then 'move' to OneDrive client the problem disappears. Long-term this will be the strategy but moving 250 users redirected files and folders isn't an overnight option. Has anyone else come across this? Recently or at all?"

So, since this initial post the users affected count has increased and in some instances a user can attempt to open the file up to 8 times (so far reported) before it will open. The moving of files to OneDrive also seems to have only worked for a while and for some users that the setting is applied to.

 

A logged DCOM error in Event Viewer was investigated that presented at the same time as the file access but this also only temporarily or did not resolve the issue.

 

Any help, pointers or similar experiences welcome.