Microsoft Office Live Small Business Community

Hi all

 I'm having a bit of a problem and I'm not sure where to go for help. I have a website at www.thatlldoit.com where I host files for the public to download. I can download them to my home PC wihtout any problem, but other folks get a corrupt zip file when they download the files onto Win XP machines. These files are Access 2000 MDE files zipped up so you have to have MS Access to use them. Whether or not they have Access installed should not make a difference at that point becauce they are not trying to open the files, just unzip them.

I then tried downloading the files to my work PC and also got corrupt zip files. MDE files are considered executables so maybe security settings need to be adjusted. But I'm pretty good at getting IE to download anything.

Is there something I have to do at my end, or is this a machine-based issue?

Hello Bill:

There has been a ongoing issue with zip files getting corrupted being downloaded from office live. I switched to using winrar and compressing the files as rar and corruption issue disappeared.

Gary

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Hi Gary

Thanks for confirming what I expected. MS is mucking up the downloads. Maybe I have some clout with MS being an MVP, or maybe I'm just spitting into the wind, but I will certainly pursue this.

Hi Bill; as Gary indicated is a known and really bothersome issue that has been difficult to eliminate. You can follow up with me (send me a private message through the community) if you want more details.

Filiberto  

Thanks for the confirmation, Filiberto. I've asked Jeff Conrad to test this on his OL site and am waiting to hear form him. It is a very big issue to me. It completely defeats the purpose of my site. I feel I have been let down by Microsoft if this is a known issue and has not been corrected.

To clarify: it has not been corrected because it has been very difficult to reproduce it in an environment that would allow us to troubleshoot; not for lack of trying.

Hi Bill,

Does your zip files become corrupted if you download them using Firefox?

Royster
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When my web site was in Beta version zip files were available. It's very frustrating to not be able to use them.

FireFox seems to do OK with the files. Ironic, isn't it?

Judy

I moved all my files to eSnips.com. While it isn't as nice as hosting them on your site, it is a work-around. I'm hoping to hear from an insider as to what can be expected instead of a blanket "we know it is happening but can't fix it right now. Sorry...not!" response.

Hey folks, we think the issue has now been fixed for the Web Sites/Web Hosting.  We patched our servers earlier this week.  We did not apply the fix to our Business Applications area yet, so we think the issue may still exist there.  But since that area has lower usage, we wanted to get the change out for Web Hosting first to see if it helped.

 Please go ahead and try this out to see if it fixed the problems you were encountering.  Also, if you don't yet have Business Applications, you should check them out and let us know if you see the problem there still in Document Libraries for example.

For some additional background... The issue is not that Office Live is corrupting the ZIP files.  The issue is actually a bug in Internet Explorer in interpreting ZIP file types.  That's why Firefox worked OK.  Here's the KB article that describes the problem.  So yes, it is a Microsoft bug, but nothing special that Office Live did to cause this.  To make matters worse, our corporate network proxies/environment did something to mask the problem, so we had a very hard time reproducing the issue. 

 Thanks everyone who gave us your repro steps and helped out on this one.  Please check it one last time and let us know how it goes!

 Chris

Thanks Chris.

I just ran a checked on all my zip files on my Public Site in IE and they all work just fine. Yah! No more telling users to switch to Firefox to open zip files.

Thanks. Please let us know when the fix has been applied to business apps.

Norris

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Thanks for checking this out.  Glad to hear it has resolved the problem for Web Hosting.

Regarding Business Applications, just to confirm, you all have seen this same problem there too?  If yes, can you provide a little information regarding your scenarios and whether you are completely blocked? This will help me push to get this fix applied sooner rather than later.

Chris

Thanks for letting us know, Chris. Jeff Conrad also contacted me to test again. All went well. I REALLY appreciate the effort that must have gone into this bug-fix.