A great vista feature

[Spacecadet]

Thats something for the email client to sort out, not the OS

I suspect the builder friend of yours was using an email client, in which case vista won't have a clue what to do with the file unless explicitly told to do. I'd hazard a guess that a similar thing would happen on an apple too.

And, if vista did automatically save such files to the desktop of my documents, then you'd accuse it of being unsecure by automatically saving potentially virus ridden files.

[VectraMan]

Thats something for the email client to sort out, not the OS.

I agree - nothing to do with the OS.

The real problem here is that not many things respect read only files. What ought to happen is that it saves a temporary file so you can open it, but a read only file. Then Excel should recognise a read only file and not allow you to modify it.

If you want to edit, you should be forced to save it somewhere.