The above code didn’t work because of browser security.
I’ve decided to go with this code:
<?php
global $post;
the_post();
$location = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'sc_stace_resource_location', true);
$count = (int) get_post_meta($post->ID, 'sc_stace_view_count', true);
$count++;
update_post_meta($post->ID, 'sc_stace_view_count', $count);
?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title><?php the_title(); ?></title>
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="1;url=<?php echo $location; ?>">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Redirecting to selected file. If nothing happens <a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/33766/<?php echo $location; ?>">click here</a>
</BODY>
</HTML>
The site I’m developing for is for a company intranet and on their network they have to use IE. Because the site will be an intranet site the site is seen as trusted in IE so file links work fine.