On the off chance this may help someone…
My mother recently upgraded to Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. It seemed that the upgrade went smoothly, but a couple of days later, she had trouble opening certain .doc, .ppt, and .xls files with Office 2004. The error messages were obscure. Messages from Excel complained about not having read permissions on the file. PowerPoint would complain about not being allowed to open the specified file type. And Word had no error message; some docs simply wouldn’t open. There were lots of Google results, none of which helped.
The problem? It turns out she had a “#” character in the name of a parent folder. Once we removed the “#”, all was well.
I understand that “#” is an unusual character, but come on! This is 2009! I should be allowed to use whatever characters I please when naming a folder.
