Two offices are connected through a VPN tunnel. When the VPN device at the remote office went down we had the users logon to the "Remote" website for MS SBS 2011 since we still had an internet connection. All the clients in this remote office use Office 2013 and have redirected folders for their Desktop, and Documents.

Whenever we tried to open Office documents from the server shared folders (not using SharePoint) or from their redirected Documents and Desktop folders there is an error. We even tried downloading them to the User's Download folder and the error continues. The error is:

"Microsoft Office Excel cannot access the file <filepath/filename>. There are  several possible reasons:

                             - The file name or path does not exist.
                             - The file is being used by another program.
                             - The workbook you are trying to save has the same name as a currently open  workbook."

These Office 2013 installations required online accounts and I have tried signing them out and in in an attempt to get beyond this error.

Hi AltramSol,

Based on your description, this is a known issue in Office. When Office applications launch, a file system initialization process is performed, and among this process is a check for the Desktop location stored in the registry key at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Desktop.

From this location, Office applications initiate the volume list and get the first fixed volume.

Since the desktop location is used as a shortcut, and if the network connection is missing or latent, the Office application is unable to find the location of the desktop and the behaviors described above may occur.

If disabling the folder redirection is not a viable workaround to these issues, enabling offline caching of the redirected folders or disabling NetBIOS may avoid these problems.  

To get more information about this issue, please refer to this KB article:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2816253

Hope it's heplful.

Regards,

Emi Zhang
TechNet Community Su