Office 2003 not allowing saving to network drives

[Thinkster]

Have a friend with a small Network of 3 computers. They are of all different ages, so the oldest one (Windows 98) has Office 97 on it and a shared 'My Documents' folder in it with permissions for Read & write. The other two systems are Windows XP, but one has Office XP, the other Office 2003. Firewall is disabled on the XP Systems.

Now here's the thing, on the system with Office 2003, If you try to save a document from within Word, Excel, Powerpoint to Drive M: (which is a mapped network drive from the Windows 98 documents folder), It fails and gives some sort of error indicating path not found. It will allow local saving though, and then I can manually copy the locally saved file to Drive M: just fine. I can also save from within any other application like Acrobat or Photoshop to the M: drive. Also, the other XP system that has Office XP is able to save fine from within an office application to the Network drive M:

So besides dumping Office 2003 (which I don't really like anyways), is there someway to make this work or did Microsoft just screw up with their Office 2003? (I know they did with Outlook 2003!)

[Marsden]

Trying to mix old with new... never a good idea. Could be a permissions issue if NTFS on your XP machine is trying to map to a 98 FAT32 drive. Since 98 can't open or run Office 2003 documents or applications... this could be your trouble.

I never ran 98 and up (SE or Me) so I can't say for sure.

Try saving your Office 2003 docs in an older compatable format.

I use Outlook 2003 with Exchange 2003 and I have not seen or used a better email client. Spam in my Inbox has decreased to almost nothing. Maybe a single spam per week if that.

[Thinkster]

I don't think it can be a permissions problem as I can save a newly created document from any other application to the Mapped Win98 PC and it saves fine. I'm not attempting to open Office 2003 files on the old machine, just simply use it as a common storage area.

To me it just seem like a bug that Microsoft needs to fix or some stupid "feature" they added, but a restriction or limitation shouldn't really be considered a feature though...