Has anyone come across the following problem before - I've only come across this in Excel 2003 running on Windows 2000 Server.

Every so often, when trying to save a workbook that has been open for some time, I get an error message along the lines of "the directory ... cannot be accessed or is full. Workbook cannot be saved." followed by another, "AutoRecover has been disabled for this session".

When this first happened, I assumed our server had crashed or was suffering congestion. After all, this usually happens at the same time as our Outlook reports "waiting for data from Exchange Server...".

However, after this point, trying to 'Save As' to ANY other location (local disk, USB flash disk, Desktop etc) repeats the same error message (cannot access or is full) and yet, all other programs will, at the same time, continue saving quite happily to anywhere (server, local or removable).

It would appear that Excel 2003, when getting disconnected from a server path, doesn't attempt to retry the connection and also applies the 'lost connection' flag to all other drives selected, until the application is shut down. This means that all you can do at this point is close down, lose all the changes, with no chance of autorecovery.

Has anyone else come across this?