On Windows XP, when my coworker is browsing to an FTP site, the files are listed. As it happens, these are all .CSV files that we want to open in Excel 2007.
Until recently, when double-clicking or r-click "Open" on these files, the prompt would launch to Run or Open them. Now, when double-clicking or r-click "Open" on these files, an Internet Explorer (IE7) window opens to a blank page and stops loading.
File associations in Windows show that CSV files are associated with Microsoft Excel. In fact, if we copy the file from the FTP to the Desktop they open immediately in Excel with no interference from IE -- the broken behavior only seems to kick in when we are opening from the FTP location where it was working fine earlier.
Now, please be aware this is Windows on a managed domain with a few Group Policy restrictions, however we spoke to the administrator and he is stumped as well and says nothing has changed. The rest of us on the same network (but on Vista instead of XP) can open the files on the FTP normally.
Unfortunately simply opening the files from the desktop is not an option because my coworker manually goes through many of these files 3 times a day, unless maybe an easy way to automatically open them locally can be done. My coworker also does not want to learn how to use any new FTP software and as a workaround is opening these files (kind of ironically) from IE instead of Windows Explorer, which is more cumbersome but works fine.
Is there any way to either identify the problem, or remove IE from the equation and have these files from the FTP location in Explorer open directly in Excel?
