Excel Office 2003 Documents opening as read-only in SharePoint

Recently I've been getting issues with users complaining that their old Excel files are now opening as Read-Only, and that in order to update the document they have to Save-As to their desktop then re-upload - which kind of defeats the purpose of SharePoint.

I've tried some of the recommended fixes from various sites, including the one from Microsoft which says that it won't work for Sharepoint (but other users say it does), and they just don't work on my machine. I don't want to try to do those fixes manually on the user's machines either.

In desperation I tried to find out exactly what was going on, using RegMon from Sysinternals.

What I found is that when a user clicks on a Document URL from the web, IE launches Excel using the OpenAsReadOnly shell command (by default).

By modifying the registry so that the command to Open as Read Only would essentially do the same thing as the regular Open command, I was able to workaround the situation, although for some users this was temporary - the next day something restored the settings back, and they had to run the registry hack again.

I don't know when Microsoft decided to change this policy of how documents are opened from the web, or how it was distributed to our network or our users. There are sites that say that this is by design, which begs the question, why did it work the way it did before?

I do agree that it should be fixed by using the Edit in Microsoft link, which incidentally launches an ActiveX object to open the document in Read/Write mode, but it just doesn't satisfy my curiosity as to how things were before they started working "as they should".

For anyone interested, I am on WinXP SP3, MS Office 2003 Standard Edition, with Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office system (KB923505) installed.

Copy and paste the below into a text file and save as .REG:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell\OpenAsReadOnly\command]@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\OFFICE11\\EXCEL.EXE\" /e"