fopen fails where copy works fine / Windows

[niksoftware]

I am having a very difficult time working out what to look at next. I have a page and it will not fopen a new file or an existing one to write.

Even though I have a couple of other pages that copy into the same location without trouble.

 

My PHP is 5.2.13 on W2k3 IIS.

 

Here is the code that works;

     copy($myDir.$file, "\\\\Eeyore\\TempEDI\\".$file);

 

Here is the code that fails;

     $fileN = "\\\\Eeyore\\TempEDI\\alley.txt";
     $fh1 = fopen($fileN, 'wb');

 

 

I have tried with and without the new file already existing.

 

I have checked NTFS permissions and the Share permissions.

 

The webserver in use is remote to the files.

 

I have turned on File level object access auditing on the Eeyore server (also win2k3) and the fopen call does not even hit the Eeyore server, I can see all other access to the file and folder but nothing from the page in question.

 

Safe_mode and Opendirbase are both unset in php.ini.

 

All I want to do is make a text file and add some lines of text, this problem is absolutely infuriating.