Google does have “help” pages, but they’re not that good for trouble shooting specific, idiosyncratic problems; they just tell you what to do when everything is working right. Instead, there are forums where you can post a question about a problem, and with luck eventually someone who’s solved the same problem will come along and help you.
I have no idea what the weird empty “ghost” file with the yellow page and gray bar is all about. Something like this shouldn’t happen with a generic .TXT file. I suspect it has something to do with the particular document editing utility on your phone. It might be an aspect of your (newer) version of Android, of some other utility that is automatically opening the files you’ve put in Google Drive. I further suspect the problem is that the files you’re trying to open are not Google Docs files proper, and so Google Drive is not recognizing them, but I could be wrong in this. Try creating a Google Docs file (using your PC, while logged into Google Drive), and see if your phone reacts to the file in the same way.
I’m using Android 2.3.6, on a pretty basic smart phone, so that I think that makes some of the details with your situation very different (and more complicated) from mine. I don’t know anything about Polaris (it could help, or just be a dead end for what you want to do). HOWEVER, I think I see what you generally can do, based on what I’m doing, especially with regard to MS Office files, in order to work with them on your phone in a (more or less) synchronized way.
First, you shouldn’t even try to edit any MS Office files with through Google Drive on your phone. That won’t work. Remember that Google Drive was only started earlier [DEL]this[/del] last year, as an outgrowth of Google Docs, and the two are not quite the same thing—they have somewhat differing purposes, though now all Google Docs functions are merged into Google Drive. Because Google Docs files are NOT MS Office files, Google Drive can only do so much with them. You can have both file types in Google Drive, and their icons LOOK very similar in the Google Drive directory (which is something Google should change, I think). Google Docs files emulate MS Office files, and one can convert them from or into MS Office files, but the real purpose of Google Docs is so that multiple users (in different places) can edit the same file (which used to reside in the cloud only, but now, with Google Drive is on all devices, too) simultaneously. Because the (new) Google Drive includes this capability (of the former Google Docs service), it makes Google Drive much more useful than Drop Box, (and that’s why we use it in the workplace I’ve recently transferred to, instead of Drop Box).
But it also confuses things, because syncing files is a fundamentally different purpose. So now you can have an MS Office .doc file, for example, in your Google Drive folder, right next to a Google Docs word processing file, but you can’t use them in the same way. You can’t edit the MS Office file with Google services, but that’s not a problem for your PC computer. You still just click on it in the Google Drive folder, and your MS Word program will open it and allow you to edit and save it as any other file on your hard drive. Google Drive, will sync those changes you made with your PC to the file in the cloud—eventually. As we discussed above, it’s not instantaneous, for some reason, but for me it usually syncs in about an hour or so.
However, with your phone it isn’t so simple when you want to open and edit the MS Office files you’ve put on Google Drive. Right now, Google Drive doesn’t allow you to just seamlessly open the files, and edit and save them with your phone the same way you can on your PC computer. There is a function in Google Drive called “Make Available Offline,” but this really only works for Google Docs files—NOT MS Office files. (You can put MS Office files “offline,” but when it comes to saving them, the system rejects them.) Essentially, with your phone, in order to edit and save synchronized MS Office files, you have to download the file from Google Drive to your phone’s SD card, then open, edit and save it on the SD card with an app on your phone (namely, Documents to Go, which, as you know, is like MS Office for mobile use, but maybe Polaris can do it, too). Then you have to upload it back to Google Drive. (Just remember—unlike with the DOS-based Windows platform—Google Drive will allow you to save two files with the exact same name in the same folder, so to avoid confusion, you have to be vigilant about changing file names with your file saving practices). Google Drive already will upload files of any type from your phone’s SD card. However, for some reason it won’t download files to your phone’s SD card (even though it will do that to your PC hard drive). So at this time, you have to use a third party utility app to get the file from Google Drive to your SD card, and as I described in the post above, I use Cloud2SD for that. (This app essentially uses the “SEND” command from within Android to save the file to your SD card.)
I can’t really address the specific complications and problems you’ve described in the post above, because they seem to be related to functions in Android 4.1.1 or apps in addition to Google Drive that I don’t have. But I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to follow the basic procedure I’ve just outlined. You still will need to install the Cloud2SD app on your phone, in order to get your MS Office files from Google Drive to your SD card so you can work with them. You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Well, if I have to do all this to work with MS Office files, then it really isn’t true syncing.” Yes, that’s true on the phone end of the situation, but with your PC the MS Office files are truly synced in the Google Drive cloud, though it strangely takes such a long time for the changes to appear in the cloud with non-Google Docs files. And keep in mind, if you want to have instantaneous and seamlessly synced files at all points (PC, phone, tablet, etc.), you can always start the files off as Google Docs files, and then convert them to MS Office files when you need to finish them off, or print, or whatever. (You just won’t have the exact formatting, and all the bells and whistles of Microsoft Word and Excel while you’re working on them.) And, of course, before you convert them, you can have anyone in the world who’s online also work on the synced documents, even at the same time that you are working on them. This is something that Drop Box can’t do, and that I often take advantage of at my job. It’s really convenient if, for example, I’m out of the office, and a colleague wants to go over the wording in a document. I can be anywhere, and just with my phone, we can both talk about, look at, and make changes in the document at the same time. We can do things that we previously had to meet for–even if I’m stuck somewhere across L.A. or waiting for the Metro train.