Hi,

I too have been experiencing this problem since I installed Office 2003.

In my case the problem was due to a lack of permission to create the
temporary file.

Let me explain.

The error message I got was subtly different to yours, mine was “Path/File
access error: '\VB??.tmp'”. Notice that the full-stop, in the file path,
indicating the current directory is missing. This would mean that it is
trying to write to the root directory of the drive of the current
directory.

What I did not initially know is what drive it was trying to write to. I
would have thought C: or where my Windows Temp directory was located, but
no.

It was trying to create them to our L: drive. I did not have permission to
write to the L: drive root directory.

The question was why would it try to write it to that drive? The answer
was that we use File Redirection under group policies to redirect all the
users “My Documents” folders to a sub-directory system on the L: drive.
The copy and paste operation is presuming it can use the root directory of
the “My Documents” (which happens to be the L: drive) directory as a
temporary workspace. Which would work fine if “My Documents” was on the C:
drive.

I have been given file access to the root directory of the L: drive, which
solves my problem. I however, for security reasons, don’t think that is by
any means a permanent solution. If anyone has a better solution please let
me know.

I think this problem is an oversight on the part of Microsoft. They should
rather write Temp Files to the users’ Temp directory instead of writing to
the root directory or to a relative path from the “My Documents” folder.

Hope this helps,
Thomas