Tomcat webdav servlet works fine with Office applications, that is, running WINWORD.EXE http://server/file.doc . However, if one enters file://server/directory in the Windows explorer, it does not work with Tomcat. The same test works successfully with Apache WebDAV server.
file:// accesses the local filing system not the WEBDav server so I wouldn't expect this to work. I am not aware of an Apache WebDAV server project (do you mean Jakarta Slide, http + mod_dav, something else?) but I suspect it was a configuration fluke that the file url worked.
I think that this bug is correct. As far as I know, the syntax file://server/directory is the correct one to access Webdav folders in Windows. It is first translated internally to the UNC syntax \\server\directory, which is then understood by the Windows XP Webdav filesystem driver. The first fact, the translation of file://server/directory URLs to Windows UNC path \\server\directory is documented in the Internet Explorer blog entry "File URIs in Windows" http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/12/06/file-uris-in-windows.aspx The interpretation of UNC paths as Webdav folders under Windows XP is documented, for instance, in KB article "How documents are opened from a Web site in Office 2003" http://support.microsoft.com/kb/838028 (the article explains that, when an UNC path is actually a WebDAV folder, then Office 2003 access it through the WebDAV protocol rather than through the normal filesystem interface of the operating system. When I say Apache WebDAV I mean httpd + mod_dav. Sorry for the ambiguity.
As far as I can tell (I can't find a way to force the file url to use a different port) this is the same as 36303. If I try to add a webdav folder as a network place it works perfectly on any port other than 80. On 80 it fails with exactly the same error message as I get trying a file url. All the evidence here points to a MS bug. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 36303 ***