Haven’t been able to find much information about this anomaly, so I thought I’d post it..
Scenario: Team site with document libraries. They all use custom content types with required fields including the document’s ‘Title’ property.
Cause: Saving and working with encrypted (password protected) office documents.
Problem: When users initially save documents to the document library, encrypted or not, they are forced to fill out required properties in the Document Information Panel defined by the default content type. Since these fields are required, the document is automatically checked out by default. So far, so good. But when the user tries to check the document in via the client, an error is produced. Only saves will work.
This forces the user to manually check the file in via the browser/document library interface. Only problem is that none of the document properties are saved and users have to manually edit the properties from the browser and then go back again to the item’s property menu to check in the file. This happens again everytime the same file is opened in Edit mode. Very tedious! Unencrypted documents are not affected.
Hopefully this will help others along the way and save you some gray hairs. Anyone know of a fix or workaround for this?
WordPress rocks by the way, typed this post up on my mobile while waiting at the doctor’s office. 🙂
The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife 
Hi there Henry
Thanks to a nice MS person we where able to solve the encryption problem. The steps that we needed to take where these:
Find tou Office setup.exe and run it with /admin switch
setup.exe /admin
This will start the Office Configuration Tool.
If you have previously configured setup customization files the you can edit those or create a new customization file.
After the settings part has loaded you should go to
Features\Modify user settings\Microsoft Office 2007 System\Security Settings
You can find there two lines that start with “Protect document metadata …”. Set those lines to Disabled
and save your configuration file File->Save.
The tool will create an MSP file for you that is needed to run on every computer where you want to work with Sharepoint and Office 2007.
I think you can deploy this MSP file with an script using msiexec and Group Policy.
Hope this solution can help other people but it definitely helped us.