A colleague of mine recently had an odd issue when trying to uploading files to a SharePoint site. Here’s what happened…

When he tried to upload multiple document to a MOSS 2007 document library from a Vista desktop that has IE8, things worked fine if he was using documents that are in his user profile. But when he selected documents that were not in his user profile (Ex: folder on c: drive or USB drive), he got a file not found message when trying to upload.  If he upload a single file from the same location, or if he dragged and dropped via the explorer view he have no issue.

I hadn’t seen that particular issue before, but I have seen weird behavior with Vista about accessing certain files when UAC is enabled. Basically, Vista wants to raise the UAC dialog box to allow you to access files off of root drive directories, including USB drives. But, I thought I remembered that Vista sometimes cannot or does not display the UAC from Internet Explorer. So IE just fails if it needs to access these files.

I recommended that he disable UAC on his Vista machine as an easy way to test. Good news: it worked. The moral of the story: if Internet Explorer is behaving oddly when needing to access certain files on a Vista machine, try disabling UAC.

Microsoft’s Tim Sneath has a how-to on disabling Vista UAC.