Well, I'm asking this question on behalf of my friend. He's using Windows Vista Ultimate and MS Office Word 2003. (I'm on XPSP2 anyway, don't have that luxury to upgrade anytime soon..)

The problem was that my friend has this one word document in his usb flash drive. After he has done some editing with his word document and try to save it, the error messages "Word cannot complete the save due to a file permission error" prompted into his screen. He soon discovered that the file was deleted from the flash drive whenever he try to save the file directly to flash drive.

He also tried to duplicate the scenario and he got the same problem over and over again. His word documents keep on disappearing or deleted for that 'file permission error' reason.

The only workaround that i've found for this problem was, do the editing in the harddrive first and then 'move-and-paste' the file to the thumbdrive afterward. Now, this somehow works for him.

There is no other security related apps installed in his machine beside Avast! Antivirus Home Edition.

Any ideas ?

I had the same problem....could not modify a WORD file from a USB drive or Jump drive. Solvedit by formatting all my USB drives in NFTS instead of FAT or FAT32. Hope this helps.

Thanks for replying.
I did some googling and found out about this : http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/.../05/108205.aspx

its seem that if i want to format the usb flash drive to NTFS (using win xp), the quick removal feature must be disabled first right ? is this true for win vista too ?

and i also found out that, if i did that, i'll no longer have the feature to quick remove the usb flash drive anymore.. is this true ?

If memory serves.....I think I heard somewhere that some older versions of Office, won't work correctly with Vista.

On the file vs. Flash-Drive thingy..... has it been tried to just copy the files off of the FD into the Documents folder on the HD, editing them with Word and then copying them back to the flash drive?

That seems like a workable solution.
Give it a try and see if it helps.

I have Vista Ultimate, on a new PC that I recently built, but I don't (and won't) have Office on it.
So I can't test out your problem for myself. Sorry!

Cheers Mates!

Andromeda43

Andromeda43, it didn't just limited to office apps, try editing using whatever apps(and files) and try to save it directly to the flash drive, i think the results will be the same. the file will be deleted.

Files are being... deleted?

Can't you sue Microsoft for this?



You're not missing anything, apart from incompatibility left right and center,
it deleting your files, astronomical memory usage, DRM, a ridiculous price tag...

...IMO Vista is not an "upgrade", it is a pain, a completely pointless OS, period.

First when i'm trying to save an edited version of a word document, the dialog box of 'file permission bla bla bla' will be prompted into the screen, then when i open up browsing the usb flash drive, the file is gone.

then something weird happen, i open up the 'affected' flash drive on my winxp, a tmp file existed, renaming that file to *.doc and i'll have the original file back. hmm...

I'm going through this fiasco still... does anybody have a solution to this problem yet?

What happens if you run word via the "Run as Administrator" right-click option?

when I right-click, I dont get that option to run as admin

In addition to not having permission to overwrite the files on the flash drives, I sometimes get the error saying "Check the drive to make sure the door is closed and it contains the correct disk of CD"

I have no idea why Word is giving my such an error.

This problem started when a client of mine was using word 2000. I then upgraded to 2003 with no luck and now word 2007 is still giving me the same problems.

Also, at the very end of the permission denied fiasco, it ends with saying "Word has lost data due to a bad network connection or missing floppy. Documents relying on this data are going to be saved and then closed."

However, the documents are not saved and it is lost... I do have them backed up (thankfully) but this pretty unacceptable since it pretty much forces my to quit the application.

Okay, for some reason, I couldnt find the actual executable for word 2007, so I was unable to "run as admin."

I found the solution via Microsoft's KB:
MS KB

As discussed earlier, formatting the drive into NTFS would remedy the problem. The only downside to that is that is that I don't think you can write onto NTFS formatted disks from a mac.

I went for it anyways to make my client happy.

hope this helps others.

cheers!

Sounds to me like you spent so much time customizing your XP install that you refuse to upgrade. It was probably 2002 before you upgraded to XP, huh? You will come around some day.

I have a Dell XPS M1210, Core 2 Duo 2.0 Ghz, 2GB RAM, 256MB NVidia GeForce Go7400. Vista runs beautifully. I dread going back to XP, and dislike that I have to run it on my workstation at work.

I have this problem on Vista w/ Office 2007... It's not just an older version of Office problem.

I've found it best to copy my document to my desktop and edit it there and then copy it back to the usb drive.

Ive had that exact same problem, it goes through those stages with the same popups, then says it is going to save my work but it doesnt..as a result i have to go back to my old backup which i forget to update so ive lost about 5 pages :@..does anyone know if i can recover the recent document it says it is going to save? i tried a word recovery program called 'DiskInternals' but i couldnt find the most recent one anywhere..anybody have any ideas?

Run process monitor while trying to save - see what the "actual" error is (you should probably filter on just file system activity, and exclude registry and process / thread activity).

i am also getting the same problem.
You don't have the permission when i try using wordpad and it saves on some drives but not on others.

erm, care to check the link to the MS KB??