[Solved] I'm locked out of documents

[ajijicjal]

[SOLVED] When I try to open one of my documents I get a message saying the document is locked for editing by (me). How do I unlock it?

[FJCC]

Close all of your OpenOffice files. Set Windows to show hidden files and folders. You can do this by typing Hidden Files in the search box and following the link to Shows Hidden Files and Folders. Go to the folder where your locked file is and look for files whose name starts with .~lock. After you delete those files, the lock should be removed from your files. These .~lock files are written as a normal part of opening a file but they should be deleted when the file is closed. If the problem returns, we'll have to investigate why that is happening.

[ajijicjal]

O.K. That got me into the document but when I typed something and then tried to save it I got the dreaded input/output error.

[FJCC]

Have you tried saving with another name or copying all of the document content to another file?

[ajijicjal]

Yes, I've tried both of those and I get an error message saying "File not found".

[FJCC]

Sounds like OpenOffice is badly confused. I don't know of any way to fix this that does not involve closing the program, which will possibly cause the loss of your document. Can you copy all of the text to another application, like Notepad? That will not save your formatting but at least your text will be available. Then shutdown OpenOffice and restart it. If that does not fix the problem, try resetting the user profile. To do that, shutdown OpenOffice, open any folder and enter
%appdata%\openoffice\4
in the address bar near the top. That will take you to a folder containing a folder called user. Rename that to user_old and restart OpenOffice.

[ajijicjal]

I copied the text from one of my documents to WordPad and was able to save it as a document with a different name and I have been able to edit and save in that program. So I guess I'll just copy all of my relevant documents over to that program. Thanks for all your help. Once I get all that done I'm going to try your last fix suggestion and see if it works.

[robleyd]

If you have Windows Defender activated, see this topic for a possible solution.

[ajijicjal]

[SOLVED] The Windows Defender was what was causing the problem. Thanks for the help guys!