Can anyone help replicate/explain this Leopard/Vista issue?

wirespeed

Apologies if I'm posting this in the wrong place, but I'm hoping someone can at least verify this issue and perhaps explain the cause... I've primarily become a Mac user in the last year, but I still work in a PC world. Fortunately none of my customers/co-workers are using Vista, but this could potentially become an issue for me in the future.

The issue:

I take any file on my Mac (running OS X 10.5.1) and Ctrl-click on it and choose 'Compress "Filename" (I have no compression software other than what's built-in to Leopard).
I then move that file to a PC running Windows Vista Ultimate with all current updates and no additional extraction software (no WinZip or WinRAR as examples).
In Vista, I right-click on the file and choose 'Extract All...' Vista extracts the file(s) to a folder with the same name as the compressed file, but the files contained in the folder are green (encrypted). Vista's self-extractor is adding encryption to the files compressed on the Mac.
Less than helpful messages pop up asking the user if they want to back up their encryption keys or risk losing their files.

It's easy enough to remove the encryption on the Vista box, but given that this doesn't occur on Vista if the files come from another Windows PC, and doesn't occur if I use WinZip or WinRAR on the Vista machine it's being viewed as a problem with the Mac when I don't believe that to be the case.

I'd really like to understand why the Vista extractor is adding encryption to the Mac compressed files when it extracts them. It's obviously not a major problem, but the first time a user extracts a file in this manner on Vista they're prompted to back up encryption keys so they don't lose access to their files (of course Vista doesn't tell them which files).

If you understand what's happened it's not a big deal, but unfortunately not all of the Windows users I share files with are going to understand it (like the guy who brought this to my attention and refuses to run WinRAR/WinZip). Of course they blame the Mac for causing the issue because it's only the files from the Mac that this happens with. ><

Just as an FYI, this is Vista specific. I tested it with XP's built in extractor and this doesn't happen at all.

Have any of you seen this issue/can verify this issue? Any idea why Vista is doing this to files compressed on a Mac?

Thanks in advance.

Epyon9283

I saw this at work the other day. Just reproduced it now with my Vista virtual machine. Weird.

wirespeed

Thanks so much. I could think of no reason why it would be specific to my OS X setup, but I just wanted to verify. I really appreciate you replicating it. I'm searching everywhere to try and understand Vista's behavior.

bash

Can you try making a zip archive with Leopard's command line tool and see if Vista behaves similarly?

% zip test.zip file1 file2 file3

Leopard and Tiger's archiving utility both store a manifest of the files in an archive with their HFS metadata so I wonder if Vista's unarchiver pays attention to this and makes its default behavior file encryption or something. I've never seen this before but it seems like Vista either has a bug or some odd behavior programmed in.

wirespeed

Using the command-line zip on the Mac prevents Vista's extractor from adding encryption. Thanks for the workaround.

I'm pretty sure there are some fixes to the basic extractor in Vista's SP1, so hopefully this will be one of them.

Epyon9283

Yes it doesn't appear to happen in the SP1 RC.

There is some other odd stuff with Vista and OS X. On Vista I shared out my home directory. Connecting to it with Leopard shows that most of the folders within it are read only. The user I logged in as is the owner of all these folders and as such should have full privileges. Its really weird because doing a show info on one of the folders reveals an option called "Locked" that I can uncheck. Once I uncheck it I can write freely to that folder.

If I attempt to write to one of these folders without having unchecked the locked option it returns a "The operation can not be completed because you do not have sufficient write privileges" error. This error however is not coming from the Vista machine to which I am connected. I have sniffed the traffic and there aren't any permission denied errors being generated. Unchecking the locked option appears to just search the folder. Its quite odd.

wirespeed

Thanks for trying it with SP1. I was planning on grabbing it, but hadn't gotten around to it.

I've seen that locked folder thing as well. Once I figured out how to work around it, it wasn't so bad.

Thanks again.

GrimReaper

I've never actually used compress in OS X, i've always used third party programs. My current preference being 7zX. It uses 7zip so it delivers excellent compression ratios.

My advice for the moment is first of all try a different program to compress them to zip (or a better compression format like 7zip). If the problem is still occuring perhaps try preventing your compression programs from including hidden files when compressing for example .DS_STORE.

Maybe Vista is mistaking some of the hidden files (if they're being compressed) for encrypted files or something bizarre.

I may try reproducing this later today when I get home, my desktop pc has XP/Vista on it and I have a Macbook Pro.

wirespeed

GrimReaper wrote: »

I've never actually used compress in OS X, i've always used third party programs. My current preference being 7zX. It uses 7zip so it delivers excellent compression ratios.

My advice for the moment is first of all try a different program to compress them to zip (or a better compression format like 7zip). If the problem is still occuring perhaps try preventing your compression programs from including hidden files when compressing for example .DS_STORE.

Maybe Vista is mistaking some of the hidden files (if they're being compressed) for encrypted files or something bizarre.

I may try reproducing this later today when I get home, my desktop pc has XP/Vista on it and I have a Macbook Pro.

I appreciate the information.

In this particular case, a third-party extraction utility on either side will resolve the issue. If it were Leopard causing it, I'd get a third-party compression utility in a heartbeat, but that's not the case. Clearly it's a Vista issue which appears to have been resolved by SP1.

A friend of mine said it quite well:

one, i can't figure out why there would be any code in the vista built-in extractor to encrypt files during decompression.

two, i can't figure out why having mac system files in the archive would trigger it.