Why does my PDF ask for a password after being retrieved from Visual SourceSafe?

Question

PREFACE: Yes we're moving away from VSS in the next few months.

One of my web projects contains, as one of its files, a PDF. The PDF on our QA site is being pulled from VSS.

A QA tester recently told me he's being prompted for a password when he tries to open it. VSS says the file I have on disk is different than the one it has, so I updated it, but afterwards it's still being shown as different.

So basically VSS is mangling my PDF and the results are so wobbly that Adobe Acrobat Reader is confused and thinks it has a password.

I've tried adding it as Auto-Detect and as Binary. Same results.

Why does my PDF ask for a password after being retrieved from Visual SourceSafe and how can I prevent it?

Answer 1

Do you have the SourceSafe 2005 Update installed?

Handy list of known issues: http://blogs.msdn.com/richardb/archive/2007/06/06/list-of-bugs-fixed-in-sourcesafe-2005-gdr.aspx

The PDF bug was one of the most commonly requested hotfixes: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925234

I've tried adding it as Auto-Detect and as Binary. Same results.

To be clear, are you adding a version of the file you know is not already corrupted? Even so, there are plenty of other bug fixes on the list above which can cause random file corruption -- try that first.