The Explorer view in SharePoint is a very useful feature when working with files and enables you to for instance drag and drop files into a SharePoint Document library, directly from you client or between folders in the Document Library. However, if you do a search on “SharePoint Explorer View” you quickly find that there are a lot of problems registered in KB’s and forums about the feature. Sometimes it does not work as expected and sometimes not at all and unfortunately SharePoint often has to take the blame for it when it’s actually almost always a problem outside of SharePoint.

There are a lot of things that can cause problems with the explorer and therefore comes here a troubleshooting guide.

First of all let’s just briefly explain how this Explorer View works. The Explorer View is a built in SharePoint View and is available out of the box on both WSS and Moss. What happens when you switch to the View is that the content of the Document Library is displayed as if you are using an Explorer Window on your computer. Depending on what Browser you use the window opens up as new Explorer Window or integrated in the browser itself.

In the background the protocol that is used is WebDav. WebDav is the updated version of the old FrontPage RPC protocol (FPRPC). When you try to open a Document Library in the Explorer View WebDav tries to connect to the SharePoint Library and if it for some reason fails, it has a fallback function and tries to connect via the FPRPC.
There are two easy ways to see if your connection is done using WebDav or FPRPC. When connected to the Document Library, look at the path displayed in the Explorer Window. If you see a path looking like a mapped drive starting with two back slash ” \\” then your connection is done with WebDav, if you instead have http:// in the path then it’s a FPRPC connection you have. You can also determine it by right click in the Explorer Window and look at the options that are given. If it’s a limited menu appearing then you have the FPRPC.

 

If the menu looks just like when you working with files locally on your computer then you are using WebDav.

 

Since WebDav is a much better protocol you should aim for having this protocol working instead of the older FPRPC. Earlier (Windows XP and backwards) WebDav were only possible through port 80, but with Windows Vista there were an updated version to the WebDav Client on Windows machines and it now allows https. If you are not running Windows Vista I recommend you to download these and install this:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=17c36612-632e-4c04-9382-987622ed1d64

A common misunderstanding about WebDav and SharePoint is that you need to allow WebDav in the Web server extension in IIS to get the Explorer view to work. It’s true that it uses WebDav but SharePoint handles this in itself and therefore it actually doesn’t matter if you have it enabled or not, at least not for the Explorer View. If you are using other components or for instance SharePoint Designer then you need to enable it and by default its disabled.

If you have made sure that you have the latest WebDav client and you still for some reason can’t access or use the Explorer view properly you should start with deleting temp files located in your nethood folder located in:

Windows XP:
 c:\documents and settings\[Username]\nethood

Windows Vista
c:\users\[Username]\nethood

And you should also delete the cache files located in:

Windows XP
c:\documents and settings\[Username]\application data\microsoft\web server extensions\cache

Windows Vista
C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Web Server Extensions\Cache

This should especially be done if you have connected to the Document Library via FPRPC earlier and now want to make it work with WebDav. Note that after deleting this you should reboot your client.

In one of my recent assignments we had a big problem with the Explorer view not working in some of our environments and in some it worked like a charm. We also had different results depending on client. So finally we opened up a case at Microsoft and it turned out that there is a bug in Windows XP (that they don’t intend to fix since XP is now in a Extended Support Phase) were the Webclient and mrxdav services is started in the wrong order.
To see if this is the problem start a commander and type:

net stop webclient,
net stop mrxdav
net start webclient

This is something that could be incorporated in the logon script to ensure proper functionality of the client. There is unfortunately no known KB for this which is a pity since there are probably more then one that has encountered this problem.

If this still doesn’t work you should start looking in to Proxy server, Firewalls or Load Balancing server. To test and troubleshoot network problems related to the Explorer view is a whole other story but there are a couple of good tools I recommend.

Fiddler is a free tool for logging all your http or https traffic and then afterwards you can analyse it you find it here: http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

NetMon is a Microsoft tool for analysing traffic and can be used both on your client and on your server. Found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=f4db40af-1e08-4a21-a26b-ec2f4dc4190d&displaylang=en

If you want to learn more the Explorer View and the WebDav protocol you should defenately read the Microsoft Whitepaper named Understanding and Troubleshoot SharePoint Explorer. It’s a couple of years old but much of it still applies.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c523ac7a-5724-48be-b973-641e805588f4