When you open an attachment in Outlook 2003, it saves it into a temporary directory then shells the appropriate program to open it. If you then do a Save As from that program, it defaults to that directory, which appears to be something like this:

c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK85\

A colleague of mine “lost” a bunch of files into there. Try and browse there through Windows Explorer, and you can’t find it. In fact you can get locked out of it even from the application Save As, if you go to the parent directory. The only way to get back in is to type the path manually, or search for the OLK85 directory on the filesystem.

To further confuse things, in a completely different directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Recent\

…are shortcuts for all those files in the OLK directory, which are back where we started:

Confused? I am.

The default temp directory is also in that general neighbourhood by the way, and deserves a cleanout every so often.

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temp\

A quick look in mine for files more than a week old found 557 files taking 272Mb, as well as 38 directories with another 316Mb. Apart from a Temporary Internet Files directory in there, it all went happily to the recycle bin, and thence to Silicon Heaven.