garlik_bread

Well we've come to a conclusion of sorts for this issue, so going to post up our resolution in case it helps anyone else! We checked the firewall and exclusions etc. ran Wireshark tests and eventually gave the machine in questions unrestricted access past the Firewall, but nothing helped. We knew that the issue only happened when a Desktop Folder Redirection Group Policy Object was active on the machine so started playing about with that. We tried creating new Desktop shares, and moving stuff about. We eventually realised that the problem stopped happening if we used a Desktop share that was much shorter. Originally the Desktop was redirected to \\ServerName\Desktops\Student\studentWIN7\Desktop, but when creating a new share and instead redirecting to \\ServerName\StudentW7Desktop it worked. We presume this must be something to do with a maximum path length for PowerPoint and Excel, which we've read is 259 chars. It seems a bit strange to me, but at the end of the say it's working.

It's definitely a pain, I've spent days on this so far and there's surprisingly little out there. Not even sure if this has been happening for the last year running Office 2013, or if its a recent issue? We've been looking into allsorts from build issues, Windows versions, roaming profiles, group policy, folder redirection. Will look at the O365 exception now, thanks for the tips!

Yeah, Kerberos I believe. I was so hopeful for this fix, but just tried it and it doesnt appear to work

Very little apparently, I know we use TMG Firewall but our Systems Infrastructure team say there is very little ougoing filtering.

Has anyone ever found a resolution for this issue? We have recently discovered that the vast majority of our machines are effected with the same problem. When loading PowerPoint 2013 or Excel 2013, any attempt to open the File Dialogue fails, especially for a Save As which gives "An error occurred while opening the file dialog. Please save your presentation, exit, and restart PowerPoint". Only resolution appears to be to open IE before PowerPoint, which then allows you to open the File Dialogue. I have scripted a workaround .vbs which opens IE minimised, then PowerPoint/Excel, but this is only a workaround. This issue only affects the users when the Desktop is redirected to a server, which we have been doing by GPO for many years. If I remove the folder redirection GPO, the problem goes away (i have tried redirecting the desktop with a registry preference, but this still causes the issue). Also, it seems fine on the initial logon, but the second logon gets the error. We are using roaming profiles, but by removing the roaming profile the issue still happens, but something is definitely getting written back to the profile after first logon. Other Office applications are not affected, such as Word and Project etc. Rolling back to Office 2010 resolves the issue, but we have been using Office 2013 for over a year in our environment. We have also tested multiple Windows 7 Enterprise builds, vanilla installs, not updated and fully updated, AV and no AV.