Problems with GIT under Windows - "not uptodate"

I am having a problem trying to support my poor, deluded cow-orkers who use Windows and need to use GIT.

The scenario goes something like this:

They have a local repo, they have changes on their branch, they are staging a commit to the master branch on their local.

They do a "git merge" and the merge has conflicts. They need to undo the merge, so they do a "git reset --hard".

"git pull") they get the error message

Error: Entry "Some file name" not uptodate: cannot merge.

We've tried "git reset --hard; git pull ." We've tried "git reset --hard; git checkout -f master". Neither seems to fix this.

We Linux users don't see this.

I conjecture it is something to do with DOS's CR/LF line endings (the files in question are a type of XML file which ALWAYS have CR/LF endings, even under Linux) - perhaps *something* in the GIT processing chain is trying to do a CR/LF -> LF conversion, and screwing things up.

Does anybody have any suggestions on what I am doing wrong (Please, not "you are using Windows")?