Trying to connect message when Saving in Excel 365

Similar experience for us too. Adding the traverse and execute permission that a spiceorks forum user mentioned, he wiresharked the problem and found it was being denied access, this seems to help but doesn't completely remove the problem. Found references to needing to do something in group policy but haven't fully investigated it yet

"Restricting Access to Folders using Traverse Folder Permission" https://www.techcrafters.com/portal/en/kb/articles/restricting-access-to-folders-using-traverse-folder-permission#:~:text=The%20Traverse%20Folder%20permission%20is,in%20the%20Group%20Policy%20settings.

It is a little annoying, but it gets us out of the "Waiting" zone. When the Window pops up with "trying to connect", our users discovered if we click Cancel, then click the second Cancel, we get access to the DFS Tree. From there we can click the Greater Than sign "<" to expand our folders.

Our options: (1) Wait until the connection completes (15 to 20 seconds can seem like an eternity). (2) We click the Cancel button a couple of times and we get to where we need to be within 5 seconds.

It's not just DFS. We aren't running DFS only redirected folders and are still having the problem. Mainly Excel and Outlook and saving files. Any attempt to access a unc \fileshare as the default location causes it. The workaround of setting the default location to a folder on the local hard drive and putting network shortcuts inside that seems to solve the problem.

Somebody else posted that giving everybody traverse permission on the root of the folder containing the network shares cures the problem but we found this only makes it less frequent.

I'm seeing Excel trying to connect to our domain controllers on port 80, not the file servers.

Added an outbound port 80 block rule to clients and Excel save dialog pops up instantly.

We have not found any permanent solutions. Still at the mercy of MS Developers to recognize the problem and fix.