Office problems accessing network shortcuts

Have a very strage issue here.
We recently moved from Novell to Active Directory and use Office 2000 & 2003 still.

We have one user on Windows XP & Office 2000 who has a shortcut in their home directory that points to another users home directory on a different server. When we were on Novell, they were able to open Office products (Excel for example) and goto File>Open, open the shortcut to access files from the other users home directory without a problem.

Now that we moved to AD, the user is no longer able to do this. They are getting an error message stating that they do not have access to \\server\data
The shortcut points to \\server\data\dir\dir\username

We have checked all rights and they are exactly how they were on Novell.
The other strange this is, that the user can use Windows Explorer and open that shortcut and access the files this way without a problem. They can open an Excel file from Windows Explorer and it will open in Excel.
It's just when they try to access this shortcut via Office.
They can use other products like Adobe reader and open files via the shortcut so it appears to be related to Office.