# Excel 2003 .tmp file creation issues



## TAGsupport (Mar 9, 2011)

I am running into a very odd problem with Excel 2003 and the creation of .tmp files. I am posting this on the Office support forum, but I am not entirely convinced this is an Office problem.

The workstations having this issue are running Windows 7 and have Office 2003. This is a company environment so the files are stored on a server that is running Server 2003. Our environment has a mix of users using both Office 2003 and 2007. Machines that are running Office 2003 SP3 and also have the compatibility pack SP2 to open Office 2007 files. When a user with Excel 2003 opens a .xlsx file from a network drive and saves it a .TMP file is created. If I save a file called test.xlsx it creates a file called test.xlsx~RF35148a.TMP. When Excel is closed, the file does not disappear so it is filling up some folders with these .TMP files. I also noticed that this does not happen with Word or Powerpoint files. I logged onto the machine as a user and as an admin to confirm it isn't a permissions issue.

I looked into this issue online for a while and most solutions involved disabling or changing the settings of the anti-virus software on the machine. All of our machines are running Symantec Endpoint Protection. I disabled the anti-virus on both the server and the workstation and that did not solve the problem. I did some more testing and noticed that the problem doesn't happen if the .xlsx files are saved on the local machine. This led me to believe that it was a setting on the file server causing this. I dug a little deeper and tested on our Citrix environment for remote users. Our Citrix environment has Office 2003 and is running Server 2008. I did the same process of opening a .xlsx file and saving it and, to my surprise, it did not create a .TMP file. So the problem seems to exist on the Windows 7 workstations that are opening these .xlsx files that are on our file server. 

After this I ran out of troubleshooting ideas. I am not sure if this is still an Excel issue, a setting on the file server, or a setting on the workstation that is causing this. 

If anyone has any ideas of what would be causing this, or if you have any suggestions of where I could post this question for an answer, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.


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