>I have discovered a MS kb899709 which says:
>
>The document does not open as expected. Instead, you receive the following message in a File in Use dialog box:
>FileName is locked for editing by 'another user'.
>
>Do you want to:
>
>Open a Read Only copy
>Create a local copy and merge your changes later
>Receive notification when the original copy is available
>
>You receive this message even though you are the user who previously opened the document.
>
>CAUSE
>When a document is opened by a client program, Windows SharePoint Services puts a write lock on the document on the server. The write lock times out after 10 minutes. Users cannot modify the document during the time when the document is locked.
>
>In a scenario where the program that opens the document unexpectedly quits or crashes and you try to open the document again before the write lock times out, the message that you receive says that the document is locked by another user. This behavior occurs even though you are user who previously opened the document.
>*********************************************************************************
>So, its not Word that is mucking things up, it's SharePoint...Good Grief !!!!
>
>Can you believe this solution:
>WORKAROUND
>To work around this behavior, wait 10 minutes before you click Edit in ProgramName to open the document again.
>
>Surrrrreeeeeeee ! I am going to tell my users that !
>
>I know nothing about SharePoint. Is there a way to trap that message. I think I may understand what is going on. I use the same docs for the header and data source. since I print 2 different memos for a record, that means I open and close the header/data source docs twice. I am going to try creating separate docs for each memo and see if that fixes it. Next question will be, if I print more than 1 record consecutively, will that generate the message?
>
>I will be back ! Chuck

Could you as a workaround copy server file programmatically to client workstation and then work with this temporary file deleting it at the end?