Cannot Open a Web Site, Access Files on a Server, or Save Files to a Server

You cannot connect to a particular Web site. Additionally, you cannot access files on a particular server or save files to a particular server. You may receive an error message similar to the following: This issue occurs if you are working on a computer running Microsoft Office 2000 or Microsoft Office XP, and if any of the following conditions are true:

• The Web site is on a server that is running Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services version 2.0.
• The files that you are trying to access are on a server that is running Windows SharePoint Services version 2.0.
• You are trying to save articles to a server that is running Windows SharePoint Services version 2.0.

This issue occurs when the destination Web site address on the computer running Windows SharePoint Services contains non-ASCII characters. The non-ASCII characters may appear in the server name, inclusions and exclusions (for example on a Web query), or Web names.

Note Non-ASCII characters that appear in the names of document libraries, folders, or documents in the Web site do not cause any problems.

To resolve this issue, upgrade the client computer to Microsoft Office 2003.

Office XP and earlier versions of Office use an older version of the Web Extender Client (WEC). This older version of WEC uses code-page-encoded URLs instead of the current standard of UTF-8-encoded URLs. Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 permits code-page-encoded requests with earlier versions of WEC and Windows SharePoint Services. By default, IIS 6.0 and Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 accept only requests that are encoded as UTF-8.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.