Comments on: A word about troubleshooting the Explorer View

By: Tom Wisner

Tom Wisner — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 17:30:34 +0000

Thank you for this. Explained the issue and the solution worked

By: Moe

Moe — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 11:46:16 +0000

Hi,

Thank you for this helpful article. Actually, I am facing similar problems with Explorer View. We have Windows Server 2008 R2 on both the test and production environment. for all clients, the test environment is opening normally with Windows Explorer. However, the production opens normally with Windows Explorer for some machines but not the others. Mainly, the machines on which the Explorer View does not work either have Windows Server 2003 or 2008 with IE 7 or Windows 7 with IE8. The weird thing is that the test environment is working when opened on these machines, thus indicating that the problem is not in the client environment. I am not sure what configuration is missing on the production servers. I have the WebClient service running. Any advice can be helpful.
Thank you.

By: Ken

Ken — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:43:28 +0000

I completely forgot to post here what we found and how we worked around it…

As the only issue we were having was with XP64 clients (XP32 and Vista64 clients worked fine), we found a workaround. On the right hand side of the Document list, there is a dropdown for “View:”. We used the Explorer View from this dropdown rather than the “Open with Explorer View” from the Actions dropdown. Through this, we were able to get the needed capability to our XP64 clients.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:56:54 +0000

Just an FYI – I found that an Office 2007 update of KB981715 on 4/13 broke all my Vista machines with Office 2007/SP2 from being able to use Explorer View in SharePoint.

After extensive testing, removing this non-critical & non-security update, this resolved the issue on our PC’s. Worth a try if anyone has had this same issue.

Thanks!

By: Ken

Ken — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:50:59 +0000

MJ – thanks for the feedback. This is on a brand new machine, clean install of XP 64. Hovering over the IE shorcut, it does show that it’s pointing to the (x86) IE installation rather than the x64 version (x64 version doesn’t even provide the option to open the SharePoint folder in Windows Explorer view). I looked at your references for the cache files, but in XP, there doesn’t appear to be such a folder to clear (I know the paths aren’t exacly the same, but I don’t see a Roaming folder in the profile anywhere). From searches that I’ve been doing, I’m checking with our SharePoint admins for WebDAV enabled in IIS, which may provide the means to connect directly using Windows Explorer (as you indicated). That may resolve our issue (although it hasn’t been an issue with our XP32 clients).

Thanks again for your inputs.

By: MJ

MJ — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:13:41 +0000

Ken, see my posts above about clearing the cache and going to the sites with and without %20 in them. It fixed the problem for us. Also try running 32-bit IE on x64 Windows if you’re running the 64-bit verson.

By: Ken

Ken — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:24:30 +0000

I’m experiencing this type of problem. Have XP SP3 (32-bit cilents) and XP SP2 (64-bit clients). All clients on IE8. The 32-bit clients work without a hitch. The 64-bit clients don’t do anything. Select the “Open with Windows Explorer” and IE blinks once and nothing. Checked running processes in Task Manager and explore.exe shows up, but it will anyway (task bar), but it never shows up under the Applications tab in Task Manager. Only our 64-bit XP clients are experiencing this problem. Any ideas would be greatly helpful.

By: Mattias Karlsson

Mattias Karlsson — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 06:58:18 +0000

Hi Paul

Yes we had an environment using 2 WFE loadbalances with a Cisco CSS. We changed the stickyness type to source IP on both of then and then it started to work. I’m not that good at CSS and our Cisco team helped us out byt they will for sure know what to do. What it means is that if it’s not set you could change WFE between your requests and then the connection get’s broken and you and up in a “Server not available” or similar.

Let me know if this helps, it’s interesting to know

Thanks
Mattias

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:38:08 +0000

Hi Mattias,

You mentioned that you have a problem with one WFE or loadbalanced like with a Cisco box. Can you elaborate on this? I seem to have this problem as well. Used to be to connect via WebDAV, but now can only connect via FPRPC.

Thanks,
Paul

By: Mattias Karlsson

Mattias Karlsson — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 09:41:50 +0000

Interesting and it’s probably as you say. You cleard the cache and got rid of a broken connection that the client was trying to use. That’s probably also why it worked when you logged on to the client since you got a different user profile with its own cached entries.

Good to here that you solved it!