Whenever I open a Word document the following message appears: “D:\.doc is being used by . Do you want to make a copy?”. This happens for every document and is quite tedious because I need to click the “Cancel” or “Close” button in the dialog box before I can work on the document. I am logged onto the computer using an administrator account. The computer is running Windows XP Professional SP3.

This is an interesting question since you mention that to work on the document you need to click the “Cancel” or “Close” button in the message box that appears. However, the message indicates that the file is already in-use so it cannot open that file for editing, instead asking whether you want to make a copy of the file and work on that copy instead. From your question it seems that you are in fact able to work on the original copy of the file by clicking “Cancel” or “Close” which is quite strange in itself, but strange things have been known to happen with computers so I am not surprised by any means!

We will begin by looking at the obvious culprits. Check whether the files you are attempting to open are read-only, as that could be causing the message to appear since it may seem like the files are already open but cannot be written to. To check whether the file is read-only, locate one of the documents using Windows Explorer then right-click and select “Properties”. On the “General” tab verify that the “Read-only” box is not ticked. If it is ticked, then untick the box and repeat this procedure for other files with the same problem. Why the files became read-only is unknown, but a possibility is that they were at some point copied from a CD (perhaps a backup CD or like) and since all files on a CD are read-only, when they are copied that read-only flag is retained.

However, should the files not be read-only then the next possible explanation for the problem relates to temporary files. When you open a Word file it creates a very small temporary file (around 1 KB) which indicates that the Word file is opened and locked (to prevent another user from opening and editing the same file simultaneously). It is possible that if these files are not properly released they could be keeping the Word file locked even though it is not being edited. Go into the folder containing the Word files with the problem and enable the display of hidden files and folders by going to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options” > “View” tab and enable “Show hidden files and folders” then click OK. If you suddenly see a lot of files appear with the first two characters of the name being a ~$ then this indicates they are temporary files. The naming convention for the temporary files generally follows the following convention: NiceDocument.doc = ~$ceDocument.doc with a lighter coloured icon (indicating that it is a hidden file) with a file size of around 1 KB. If you see a large number of such files then you should delete them as it seems that the temporary files have accumulated for one reason or another. Just make sure that you don’t accidentally delete the actual document files! Rather than deleting the temporary files it may be worthwhile to instead move them to a different location (just in case) and then once you are happy the problem has been fixed and you haven’t accidentally deleted any legitimate files, the temporary files can be deleted.

Should the problem continue then please contact me for further advice and we will need to look at some specific settings and configurations in Word itself to see whether the problem can be resolved.