An office 2007 client will respect the forced checkout. I think Office
2003 clients are NOT constrained by the settings. If you find a way,
please let us know.

Well you may be happy to know that if you go into the List Settings /
Versioning settings and set  it to Yes for 'Require documents to be
checked out before they can be edited?' it will require a response  to
Open Read Only or Checkout for editing - if you use 2003 or 2007.

But this only works  if the user is opening the file  from the browser.

That's pretty much the problem, if a user opens it from a Mapped
Drive, it doesn't ask this (unless using 2007)

But worse yet, if they don't open the file from the mapped  Drive, and
rather already have an updated file on their computer and simply copy
it over to the mapped drive, it wont check  Out/Check In or anything
this file.. it simply looks like the new file has been copied over,
but the old file still remains unless the user goes to the web  and
checks it out and back in again..

Yes, browser should work either way. But, only 07 seems to work
correctly from explorer.exe and SharePoint Drafts.

I do not know a workaround, sorry.

My first queston is why are you setting it up as a mapped  drive in the first
place? The users  should be accessing it either via the browser of directly from
inside the office application. This would be much more straight forward.

In a perfect world - and in the way I'd understand working with it..
this would be the case.

But users  from our one department are the only ones with 'Edit' access
to the particular folder  in the Doc Library. But they receive updated
documents through Emails or it's saved  on another network drive. So
they want to be able to simply save  the updated attached file, or
click and drag it from one folder to another..

Yes, that makes sense. In this instance I would then suggest to connect to
the library  in question, switch to the Explorer view of that library and
then do your drag and drop. I haven't had the chance to test the mapped
drive issue, so I can't address that directly.

I hadn't thought of trying
it this way. But guess what! Even when I do it that way it looks like
the new file  is copied over, (it just prompts if I want to overwrite
the file - no other checkin/out prompt), but when I then view the file
in the Doc Library, it shows the old one.

I really wouldn't even have a problem  with just denying them to copy
files into the folder  without using browser or the respective office
app. But I figure  if thats possible what I'm trying to do would also
be. It just bugs me that it looks like the new file has been updated -
very misleading to users.

Ok, now I really to play with this because I'm curious.

The problem  is that when you use a mapped  drive or Exlorer view you
aren't really using SharePoint. You are using WebDAV (Web Distributed
Authoring and Versioning). Since SharePoint doesn't control it,
SharePoint can't make demands. You'll find out that moving files  this
way also negates the file  upload size limit in SharePoint.

When you say it shows the old file, are you going by the metadata or
actually looking at the contents. In my experience it does copy over
the file, but doesn't change the metadata or create a new version.

When I say it's showing the old file. I do mean even content - the
content is unnaffected unless the user goes through the browser Checks
Out then Checks In the file.

What's kind of odd - is if I go through the browser and check  out the
file. Then I copy the file  over by the click and drag explorer method.
It updates Content and Version. Buut, file is still checked out, until
you go back in.

I found this out because if you just try and save  an attachment
through webdav, it just gives an error. Unless you have it checked out
first, then it can save it.

In looking back through this thread several points jumped out at me. I just
played with this and yes, if I tried to save  a document  into the library  via
a mapped  drive that already existed in the library then it would not allow
the save to occur, due to the require check  out enabled. Once the document
was checked out, saving  was fine. This is to be expected.

I also understand the reason you are saying this is being done. However,
point one is, this circumvents the reason for putting documents into a
document library to begin with. The whole point of the library is to provide
a central point for document collaboration and storage. If these documents
are being edited and/or stored in other locations, then why have SharePoint?
If only certain users  have edit access  to this particular library, why are
other users modifying the documents?

I'm not trying to be smart here, just asking some questions to think about.

If these other users have a genuine reason to work on these files, then
perhaps the files  should be in a different library, and you can then set  up
a workflow to copy the docs from library A to library B as needed, or some
such.