I'm not sure how many people have run into this problem, but it's one that is
extremely annoying. When a user submits a file to me (or anyone else), upon
trying to publish it I get an error that "The page is already being edited. Do
you want to overwrite or create a new one"

If I choose "overwrite" I get the dreaded "permission denied". I need to get
an answer to this. It seems to be version independent, as I have had this
problem since Contribute 2 (currently using 4.1). I have checked that all
folders have the proper permissions...one thing that seems to happen is that
Contribute, on creating a new file, only gives the user rw and not the group
(working on OS X server, so unix based). But even on giving 777 to the entire
MMWIP folder, I am still unable to publish the file.

Now, I can choose to upload the file with a different name and that seems to
work, but then we have to delete the old file, edit the new file to copy all
the contents, start a new file, paste in the content, publish it as the old
name, and then delete the previously-new file, just to get the page up with the
proper name...way too many steps.

If anyone has any clues as to how I can proceed, I'd be extremely grateful...I
just got through wiping all Contribute related files off of my server and am in
the process of resetting everything, and I'm still noticing this behavior, so
this seems like it might be in the core of Contribute itself, but I'm open to
suggestions.