Files hang in SharePoint 2010 and can't be closed.

Greetings,

We have a SharePoint 2010 farm in which we have one Web Application that is causing me grief.

The farm has been built on a three tier system where we have one web application server i.e. SharePoint 2010, one IIS server and a database server which is SQL 2008 R2. All three servers are Windows 2008 R2 x64 VMware servers.

This web application is setup with Claims based authentication with Kerberos.

We have a document library setup which has several Excel and Word documents. Opening the files in ‘Edit and Microsoft Excel (or word)’ is when we the Excel application gets hung up and the only way to close it is via Task Manager.

The only way it seems to avoid problems with files, mostly Excel, hanging (i.e. can't close) is if you first "checkout" the file and then select "Edit in Excel". Then you must check it in or discard checkout. The problem with this workaround solution is that MANY a times you know that you do not want to edit it and hence people forget to check it back in. If you select "Edit in Excel" first and do anything in the Excel spreadsheet, like sort or filter or even remove a filter then the file gets hung because you did not check it out first, even if you don't want to save anything that you did.

Also, these are simple Excel files which do not have any macros setup in them.

The Events of either of the above three servers or the SharePoint Health Analyzer hasn’t been much help in this regard.

What is causing this issue?

Daniel Christian (MCTS)