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The original was posted on /r/sysadmin by /u/TechnicallyBasedCat on 2023-10-24 15:15:25+00:00.

Hey everyone!

I have a really strange issue that I have been struggling to find a root cause for, and I was wondering if anyone else here has run into something similar or has some advice on what I could check/try next.

Problem: Several users in a small office work out of a single network share, primarily on Word (docx) documents. In the last couple of weeks, they noticed that every ~10-15 documents, they interact with one that has this strange behavior when trying to save it. Basically, when you hit the save icon, Word acts like it saves the document with no errors, nothing. But the file never gets updated in the file share.

Some other points to note:

  • The documents were all created by these employees and not generated by any system or online tool.
  • If you do a “save as” on the problem documents and create a new copy, the issue does not follow to the new document.
  • If another user tries to open and save the problem document, they will have the same issue.
  • All of the documents are in the same format (docx).
  • There is nothing visibly special about these documents: no pictures, no hyperlinks, just straight text.
  • All of them are running Office 2309 Build 16827.20130 - Current Channel.
  • We have tried running a full online repair of Office.
  • The behavior is the same whether or not the user has multiple documents open at the same time or just the problem document.
  • Documents that were previously causing an issue seemingly no longer have the issue after a couple of days.
  • Saving the document locally works without issue.
  • OneDrive is enabled and syncing OK, but they do not use the “Auto Save” feature as these files are on a network share.
  • We are running ESET and Huntress on their workstations and file server and neither have any related alerts or log entries.

This is the first time I have seen anything like this. Very strange behavior from Word.

Would appreciate any advice you can pass along for what to try next.

Thanks!