The user had not made any changes other than to install an Adobe Flash Player update on one of the two client PC's. No doubt however these PC's received recent Microsoft (and last week was a bad week for those that led to numerous problems, more than usual) and anti-virus updates (which can suddenly change settings, block ports, etc.).
All three of the PC's were Windows 7 Professional. The network had already been established as a "public network" and naturally everything had been working without any problem until this morning. The user had already tried re-booting the PC's on the network to see if that would resolve the problem. It did not.
Remotely viewing one of the client PC's that could not load the software as well as the gateway PC, we noticed that the icon that launches the software that in this situation had been previously set to "Run as administrator" now had that check box grayed out. And in trying for troubleshooting purposes to setup a new icon, Windows returned the same "file is currently not available for use" message. In navigating the available computers to set that icon, it showed the gateway PC's computer name twice which was very odd. We did make sure that the UAC was not getting in the way.
A net view of the gateway PC that had also been mapped as a drive letter for some reason indicated something interesting in the comments: [Offline share]. In trying to delete the drive map, Windows responded that files were in use but viewing the gateway PC where that drive was mapped, in fact there were no open files in the shared folder.
While we could also navigate to and view all of the files in the shared folder (and could also see the files at CMD prompt via a DIR of the UNC path), when we tried to inspect a text (INI) file by opening it in Notepad, we received the same response:
We made some minor changes to some of the network settings on both PC's, and tried to stop and start various network services on the gateway PC; the issue remained. While the sharing and file privileges all appeared to be correct on the gateway PC, we decided to stop sharing the folder and then re-share it after first disconnecting from the offline share (after also turning off the option to share files offline which seemed to have no effect). That was completed and we re-added "Everyone" with read/write privileges. In doing this, Norton Internet Security installed on the gateway PC came up with a prompt indicating that because it was a public network, certain Windows services were blocked. We decided to go ahead and allow Network Discovery, File and Printer Sharing and Remote Procedure Call and Remote Procedure Call (and so they were added to the NIS exception list) which seemed logical in that it had already been established as a public network.
Re-testing, the client PC's were then able to once again launch the tp7runtime.exe application.
There have been other reports of this issue that have involved very different solutions.
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