[LurfysMa]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 10:24:11 +0100, "Tony Jollans" My forename at my
surname dot com wrote:

There are (at least) two different issues here.

Operating system (e.g. Windows) locks must be placed somewhere where the
operating system can find them and relate them to the locked resource.

Where appropriate (e.g. concurrent updating in multi-user environments),
application-level (e.g. Word) locks must be placed somewhere where other
instances of the application can relate them to the original resource. I
don't think any current versions of Word require such locks.

Application temporary files should normally be placed in local temporary
space. Instead of using the %temp% directory provided by Microsoft's own
operating system specifically for this purpose, Word chooses to use the
document's source folder. This does confuse users and does cause problems
when working on networked devices and/or removable media.

The only time there is any real reason to use a file's source folder for
temporary work space is when saving a file - to make sure the file is
properly saved before removing the original - overwriting in place is
inherently risky.

Quite right. This would be one possible exception, but even then, if
there isn't enough space on the removable media, I would move the
original file to the hard disk, write the new version on the removable
media, then delete the old version -- all with appropriate flags to
facilitate recovery in case of power failure or premature ejection.

Again, any good undergraduate programming course would teach this.

I am inclined to agree that Word's behaviour would be considered bad
programming practice, and I can't think of a single thing in its favour.


--
Running Word 2000 SP-3 on Windows 2000