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We're running into a problem while migrating from Win XP computers to Win7 machines. We have several data gathering programs that run continuously and capture/log the data to a Win7 computer.

Other computers on the network run client programs that read those logged-data files from their location on the the Win7 machine that is acting as the "host" (I won't call it a server because it's just another workstation).

When the other computers were running XP, we had no problems with any of this. But now that we're updating to Win7, we've found that whenever any of these other Win7 machines reads one of the logged data files from the "host" machine, that file appears to be "locked" for about 30 seconds. That prevents the data gathering computer from being able to successfully append the new data to that file and also blocks other machines from being able to read the file.

This is unacceptable because the data gathering computer writes a new (replacement) file for one of these files every ten seconds, and appends to another file every 2.5 minutes. One of the "client" programs tries to read the latest data every ten seconds automatically. Thus, it keeps the file in question locked perpetually and never sees any new updated data because the data gathering PC is constantly blocked.

All of this worked just fine when the "client" PCs were running XP. The "host" was fine under Win 7 or XP, but the PCs "reading" the files apparently cannot be running Win7.

So it appears that Win7 does something when reading a file (these are just plain comma delimited text files) that causes it to be locked where XP never did this. I can replicate the issue by simply trying to load the file into notepad on any of the Win7 "client" PCs. Again, on XP, it's fine. But on a Win7 "client", the file on the "host" is locked for what seems to be about 30 seconds every time you reload it onto the client.

Is there some setting we can change on the Win7 machines to prevent them from creating this file lock?

Sorry for the long post. And thanks in advance for any suggestions.

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  • Try checking with Process Monitor what's accessing the file(s).
    – and31415
    May 9, 2014 at 11:50
  • That's a heck of a tool. I'll try running that on the "host" and see if it reveals anything. Thanks.
    – Sigmo
    May 10, 2014 at 0:27

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