We have Excel and Word files on a server. Links are established by copying
cells in Excel and EditPaste SpecialPaste Link in Word. Very big Excel
files and MANY links in the Word documents. Seven people in the office share
these files and make changes to them.

Every so often one of these links that has been working just fine will fail.
The user always has both the Excel and the Word doc open. When he or she is
trying to update all the links in the Word document, they *may* see an error
box in Excel that says, "A document with the name '....xls' is already open.
You cannot open two documents with the same name, even if the documents are
in different folders." or they *may* get an OLE error or they *may* see no
error message at all. But in Word instead of an updated link, they see
"Error: not a valid link".

So far the only way to fix this has been to break the link and then cut and
paste again. Quite a nuisance when you are dealing with upwards of twenty
failed links in one document - especially when they were all fine the last
time!

Any ideas on what might be corrupting these links?

To add a weird twist to this... The last time this happened to me at my
computer I closed the file without fixing the error or saving the file. I
went to someone else's computer, opened the same pair of files, updated the
link beautifully, saved and closed. Returned to my desk, opened the pair and
all was well. Why would it work on one machine but not another? My computer
refers to links using "S:..." and his use the UNC "hlasrvr..." if that is a
useful clue.

Things we have already tried:
All latest patches and service packs applied to Excel and Office 2003
Path names shortened and simplified to eliminate non-alpha characters and
spaces
WordToolsOptionsGeneral uncheck Update automatic links at Open

Thanks in advance for your input,
--
Laura