educateer

We are using Flash and Dreamweaver 8 on our networked Macs using OS X 10.5.6 Whenever our students try a file operation (e.g. open a file) they get the spinning beachball for approx. 3 minutes. This happens pretty much every time and is repeatable. Does anyone have any ideas why it is doing this and a possible solution? Thanks Andrew

A big thank you to all that have helped to resolve this problem. It has been driving me crazy but it looks like it is now resolved. I think the key thing that we had not done was not give the 'Full Access' permissions to the student's .TemporaryItems folder. It appears that even though we have now resolved this issue for new documents for some reason some of the older ones that were having problems before still will not save, so copying all the sheets to a new documents and resaving has overcome that issue. On top of all of this we have had another issue to compound my stress which was any macros recorded last year would not work and some students were getting an 'object library not found' message when starting Excel. Excel would then fail to load. A quick search showed that the solution to that issue was to remove the following in the user preferences: ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Registration Cache 11 One more week should see if all of the problems are resolved but I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. Thank you again for all of your help. Andrew

I will have to see if I can try a copy to a new document next time this happens. A lot of our students are starting to lose faith in the Macs because of this and are now booting to Windows!!! We have added a .TemporaryItems folder to the network share and it appears to have lots of folders inside it so I assume something is working as expected, however we still have the 'document not saved' problem. As we are storing the documents on a Windows server are there any other issues that you think we may have overlooked? Is there any special permissions magic that could be causing the problem. I remember a while ago that on Windows there are share permissions and user/group permissions. Could we have done something wrong here? All suggestions gratefully received. Andrew

Thanks for the suggestions so far. The .TemporaryItems didn't resolve the problem by itself so we will try and add the Temp folder today also. I am really grateful for all of these replies as my stress levels are quite high at the moment with many of the kids losing their work each lesson. I will feedback the results of your suggestions. I want to make sure I am adding the folders to the correct shares (all shares) before I reply. Thanks again. Andrew

When I said everything, I meant documents and user files. All the applications, etc. are still local.

Yes, I am afraid so. When doing a 'save as' you do get the dialog box to ask where to save the work but then it doesn't save it. It is possible to do a save as and save the document with a new name. It appears in the users [network documents] folder in the finder with the current date and time. Excel will even report the document has its name changed in the title bar at the top. Then as soon as you quit Excel the document disappears from the finder - it is gone, vanished with no trace. I then tried to save to a memory stick, which would suggest not a network problem, and it wouldn't save to the memory stick either with a 'document not saved' message. I don't know if may be to do with local permissions and temporary file locations, etc. as our users have very little permissions on the local hard drive. I think almost everything goes over the network.

We had a problem appear last year on our Mac OS X 10.4 computers where Excel randomly stops saving. It just gives the message that it "Cannot save". There was some consolation in that some times the document had been saved but with an 8 digit hexadecimal name (minus the extension .xls). Over the summer we have installed some lovely new shiny iMacs with OS X 10.5 and a new image. Office was installed separately afterwards. The problem has started to show its head again but this time there is no 8 digit hexadecimal file so the kids are losing their work completely. I suspect that it is network related, as I have never seen this on a stand-alone Mac, and yesterday having left a computer for an hour went back to it and it did save. Has anyone ever seen anything like this before and can offer some suggestions? It is driving me, and our students, crazy! Many thanks Andrew