OneNote and Windows Offline Files, fix for corruption bug in Vista

Do you use Windows Offline Files (also known as CSC) to sync your files between multiple computers?  Are you using Redirected My Documents to sync your My Documents/Documents folder to all of your computers?  Are you running Vista and having problems where either OneNote will crash or you get corruptions in OneNote?  Is yes to these questions you are probably hitting a Windows Vista error with the offline files sync.  In fact there is UI that appears in the Problem Reports and Solutions which tells you about this but until now there wasn't a fix available.

Last week when I saw this update that improves the performance and reliability of Windows Vista I saw this item in the list of fixes:

When you synchronize an offline file to a server, the offline file is corrupted.

I wondered to myself if this included the offline files problem we saw internally and lo and behold the fix is now public!  If you have had problems with OneNote and Windows Offline files please download this fix:

Update for Windows Vista, 32-bit versions
Download the 938979 package now.
Update for Windows Vista, 64-bit versions
Download the 938979 package now.

More info here: An update is available that improves the performance and reliability of Windows Vista.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2007
  There is a fix from the Vista team for problems related to synching an offline file to a server and the

• Anonymous
  August 20, 2007
  The fix doesn't help. I still get continual corruption problems with OneNote when accessing a shared notebook. It's a serious and recurring problem - it also happens on two other unrelated networks.

• Anonymous
  August 23, 2007
  Soulhuntre - Are you usong OneNote 2007 and you are seeing corruptions?  I have only seen this in beta builds and on this Windows Offline Files bug.  Are other people sharing this notebook and using Vista and Offline Files?  Do you get the infobar which says "This section is corrupt" and you click to repair it and does it work/fail? I honestly haven't seen this other than that problem mentioned above.  Please let me know more or try our OneNote Newsgroup where they will be able to help you more.

• Anonymous
  August 27, 2007
  Hey there :) Onenote 2007 on Vista, and yes I am seeing corruption. The the shared notebooks live on a network share and while others occasionally use them the corruption is not tied to whether anyone has or hasn't sync'd that I can tell. I do get the infobar and the repair process fails often enough that what I do now is copy the pages to a new section rather than try the repair. I have switched the notebooks to a Sharepoint document library and the problem has stopped - so that helps :) Now that I think about it - the shared folder was on Windows Home Server, which is a beta but has shown no interest in corrupting any of my other files.

• Anonymous
  September 04, 2007
  Hi, I too am getting regular corruptions with shared notebooks from Onenote 2007 and Vista.  Like the poster above my shared notebooks are hosted on Windows Home Server. The auto repair is pretty hit and miss.  More often than not I end up copying pages around manually. I'll patch my system as per the links above and see what happens.  Has there been any investigations or discoveries on this problem within Microsft?  

• Anonymous
  September 05, 2007
  Just a followup to my previous post. I already had the update installed. It isn't helping. I had two corrupted sections from two different notebooks tonight. I think i'll have to give up on the shared notebooks for now.

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2007
  I have been using the shared functionality as well for sometime and notebooks corrupt all the time. I save it on Sharepoint 3.0 and open from multiple computers, I was first working on Vista, now I switched back to XP, and the problem persists.

• Anonymous
  November 20, 2007
  Almost exact same scenario for me - WHS (release version), OneNote 2007 notebooks stored on share on WHS (duplication is turned on for this folder), offline folder on client.  The only difference I have is I'm running an XP client.  In my initial research, some folks are saying this is a WHS problem related to folder duplication.  I'll be testing to see if this fixes the corruption problems that I'm seeing.  

• Anonymous
  December 09, 2007
  We're also getting corrupted pages and sync erros on a Onenote notebook stored on Windows Home Server (release version), accessed by both Vista and XP machines. Very annoying. It has been in a duplicated folder, so I'll turn off duplication and see if it fixes things. It isn't backed up then, though...

• Anonymous
  December 17, 2007
  Same problem for me. Shared notebook on WHS causes corruption all the time :( Maybe this has something to do with WHS and shadow copies turned on?

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2008
  This sounds like exactly as my story, The only difference is that we still are on XP SP2, Any suggestions ?

• Anonymous
  January 15, 2008
  I am a Network/Systems Administrator and we are only running Windows XP Pro SP2 with the latest patches (180+ PCs). We've also obtained Hotfixes for My Documents/Offline Files issues from MS which aren't publically released.  The KB#s are 870953 and 900387.  Unfortunately these hotfixes still don't fix the issue with My Documents/Folder Redirection/Offline Files becoming corrupt if the user has PowerPoint Files over 5MB in their My Documents folder. Does anyone have any updates on this in regards to Windows XP Pro SP2?

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2010
  I'm using Windows XP and OneNote 2007. All of my notebooks are stored locally and I get corrupted sections quite frequently. It seems like it happens most often to sections I haven't touched a long time. The repair process will always wipe out one or more pages from that repaired section.