OLE Attachments and GP

This is kind of an old issue, but I ran into it recently and it did have me scratching my head a bit so wanted to post about it.  A user was having an issue that was only showing up on the Employee Maintenance window, where she could click on the Attachment button and the OLE Container window would come up, but opened up empty so she couldn’t do anything with it, other than close the window.  The attachment function worked fine on other windows, it was just this one window that was giving her trouble. 

Since it was working fine in other windows, I started down the security route, but it didn’t work as the sa user, either.  The function worked fine from the SQL Server, so it appeared to be something to do with the install. They did have HR installed so I double-checked that, made sure the OLEPath and OLEPathHR values were valid and had proper rights, which it did.  Then after recalling a blog post or forum post or support article, I couldn’t remember which, I mapped a drive to the OLEPath location, which was using a UNC path.  I then updated the OLEPath and OLEPathHR value using the mapped drive, and the OLE attachment function began working on this window immediately.

I’ve run into the OLEPath issue before where the path wasn’t valid or the button didn’t appear, but what made the issue unusual to me was the fact that it worked fine on other windows, as the user had several notes with embedded documents that she was able to pull up and use, as well as insert new documents, with no problems.  Hope this can help someone else who may run into the issue.