I have copied thousands of files of all types into the shared folders on Windows Home Server and marked all of them as "duplicate" (verb) and it appears to be doing well.
However, I have a small number (about 20) .TIF files and it is complaining about each of these files with the following message: "The following files have a conflict. To learn how to resolve the conflict, click Help." The Conflict marked on each file is "The file is open"
These files are untouched and unopened by anything that I have been involved with. So I'm trying to track down why .TIF files are open by something and what that something is or if it's a bug in WHS and if so is there a workaround?
Have you tried rebooting and seeing if that clears the lock? What about booting into Safe Mode and then doing what you need to do with those files?
You can also use a tool like Process Explorer or Filemon from Sysinternals to check what processes are attached to those files.
Is it possible that Windows Explorer itself is somehow holding a handle to the file? Don't forget the file has to be opened, at least once, to generate the preview that is then stored in thumbs.db. If you are not saving the thumbs.db file then the file will have to be re-opened every time.
I suggest you to use unlocker to find out the problem.
Try to make some operation on a file (Rename or Delete). Then according to your information it should be denied and an error message will be popped up reporting a failure to delete/ rename.
Close the message and then a unlocker window will be popped up showing the "Locker" process.
Then you can use Process Explorer or any similar tool if you want to see the process path, command line information.
Then you can remove check whether it is a startup process and will be able to consider it to disable it using msconfig.