>>Thought I would post this for anyone else having this problem. In almost every shop having "file locked" and/or "cursor is read only" the problem was caused by a bad ethernet cable end. Most of my customers are small shops and many have done the cabling themselves. After, at my suggestion, they have a pro come in and check the ethernet switch and cables or they just replace them with pre-made cables the problem is fixed. Error logs go from several a day to nothing.
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>Thanks for following up - that's an interesting data point.
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>It seems a bit odd that you would suddenly have several sites reporting that problem. But, maybe it got bad at one site, and when you mentioned it to other sites they said "Oh yeah, we see that sometimes too".
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>I've seen a few mechanical issues cause cable problems over time:
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>- cables that are slightly too short, so they are "stretched" to reach between a wall jack and the destination device. This puts stress on the jacks at both ends and on both ends of the cable
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>- office furniture such as desks rammed up against a wall that has a plugged-in cable. This bends the cable to zero radius at the end (very bad for homemade cables that don't have strain relief) and can also damage the jack
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>- patch cables run under carpets etc. that are then regularly walked over or rolled over with office chairs, equipment carts etc.
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>All that assumes the initial installation was OK:
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>- that the cable is not substandard, there seems to be increasing amounts of counterfeit cable out there
>- that the cable was pulled properly and not snagged/torn within walls, ceilings etc.
>- that jacks and cable ends were terminated properly (no bad contacts)
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>One of the most useful things I learned while I worked at an industrial plant is that 80% of electrical problems (read: hardware problems in our business) are caused by bad contacts.
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>Another thing I've seen "suddenly" start to cause errors is upgrading network infrastructure such as switches from 100Mbit to gigabit (1000Mbit). Cabling and terminations that may have been OK at the low speed may not be sufficient for gigabit - especially if it was an amateur job in the first place.

Al, back in my on site consulting days I sure did see plenty of the "chair leg crush the cable" problems.

I do suspect that faster speeds in newer computers and faster internet could be part of the reason I'm seeing a lot more of this in the past year. Plus all my customers are now using estimating systems that are cloud based and have to pull a lot of bits down of the internet. A lot more internal network traffic in the shop than in past years could be overstressing stuff that used to "get by".