An opened document which isn't found in Word.Application.Documents but still locked out?

Question

I do some Word automation filling in the blanks in some Word documents which are used as templates.

One template is used more often than the others, and this causes the error, as it locks out and Word is unable to open it, though I wish to open it in read only.

Opening the document

do until lole_word.Documents.Count = 0
    lole_word.Documents[1].Close(lole_word.SaveOptions.wdDoNotSaveChanges)
loop

boolean lb_readOnly
lb_readonly = true
lole_word.Documents.Open(as_fileIn, lb_readOnly)

The problem is that the template document is opened once, with no flaws of any kind. But when the same template has to be reused, although the lole_word.Documents.Count always returns 0, when Word opens the previously used template, it is locked out, and Word finally shows up asking me whether I want to open it in read only mode.

I wish to avoid this annoyance and simply open the file in read only mode, as it shall be saved elsewhere once it is filled in.

My problem is that even though I specify open in read only mode by setting the second parameter to true, Word doesn't seem to see it this way and still pops up his File Already in Use by Another User dialog, and then my application loses control over Word and it crashes.

Answer 1

We had a similar problem and I wish that I could remember how we solved it. We may have used the Quit command. I know that we also did an attempted FileOpen in exclusive mode (with no intention of using the file) and immediately closing it. If we got a file locked return code we prompted the user to close out of excel first because there were times they would have the program open outside of OLE. I know this isn't exactly what you were looking for but hope it leads you somewhere. I recall this being an intermittent problem and there were some cases users had to open task manager and kill the extraneous excel process.

I vaguely remember the locking being caused by the file system and not Word, as we were opening in read only as well.