Logon prompt when opening documents on a public MOSS site

A customer issue again – I'm learning more and more from my customers these days!

So, said customer has a MOSS internet site and does the publishing from an internal staging server. Of course the site on the internet is enabled for anonymous users. But when a Word document on the site is opened – i.e. – https://www.mysite.com/docsfolder/document.doc the user finds Word starting up to render the document and prompting for username & password – as you may agree, this is unexpected behavior.

I was somewhat stumped, but thankfully my colleagues came to my rescue and found me some useful info on 2 situations where this issue arises.

Word 2003 onwards, we seem to be using HTTP 1.1 Options command when opening documents from a web location and if the webserver requires permissions we generate a prompt – well if you want the details, here's the article but the gist of it as it pertains to my customer was that the customer had to allow browse permissions on the folder holding the document – i.e. – anonymous access is to be enabled on the document's folder and user given view privileges for list.

Issue 2 is Vista specific and you'll find more info here. Here are the hotfixes:

Hotfix 941853 (https://support.microsoft.com/kb/941853)

Hotfix 941890 (https://support.microsoft.com/kb/941890)

Thanks to Jacob & Andy for the info!

And there's more! As TParker laments in his entry, you'll need one final bit twist:
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/927082/en-us?spid=11373&sid=200

Don't forget the following bit!

Note After you run this command line against your site, you must toggle the Site and Surveys permissions to turn off Anonymous access. Then, turn on Anonymous access again. You must do this for the command to take effect on content that exists in the site.