Unable to copy files to Vista, Win7, Win2008

I have a VM running on a VMWare 2.0 host. The VM is running Windows 2008 SP2 x86. If I am logged on the VM and I try to copy a file/files to it, I receive the following error:

"Network Error: There is a problem accessing [insert name of file you are copying]. Make sure you are connected to the network and try again"

This is a frustrating one because if you try to resolve it by doing what most people do and that is to search "Bing, Google, Yahoo" for such phrases as : "Network Error: There is a problem accessing" or "Make sure you are connected to the network and try again" you will get led down many wrong paths; i.e. UAC, anti-virus client, firewall issue, domain credentials, etc. (But hopefully you will get this blog first).

I remember I ran into this issue on a Windows 2003 server previously and the fix was to go into Add Remove programs and make sure that IE ESC was cleared for Administrators.

So, from experience, the first thing I checked was that this was not turned on for Administrators on this Windows 2008 server:

So I tried copying over the file again and got the same error message: "Network Error: There is a problem accessing [insert name of file you are copying]. Make sure you are connected to the network and try again".

Hmm, I'm quite sure that this was the fix, but then I noticed that when I opened IE 8 I could see that IE ESC was not really turned off.  I guess that a group policy has been applied to lock this down.

I had to go to the next step and open IE Options: go to Internet Options, click on the "Security" tab and click on the "Local Intranet" icon and then click the "Sites" button, and then click "Advanced". Add the file server name to the list with this format:

\\servername or file://servername/ or domain-wide file://*.domain.com/

Try your copy now and it will work.

For security reasons you should probably re-enable IE ESC.