Issue: You are working on an assembly (checked-out) in Inventor and some sub-components are checked in.
You try to edit one of the components. You usually should get the checkout dialog from Vault but instead you just get this Inventor dialog that the file is read-only:
Verify in the Inventor Vault Ribbon - File Status - Options and open the "Prompts..." dialog:
You see that on File Edit - "File '{0} is not checked out. Do you want to check it out now?' the Response is the to "No" and the Frequency is set to "Never Prompt"
Solution: Change the answer here to "Yes" or "Yes/all" and/or set the Frequency to "Always Prompt"
Background: you once chose on this dialog in Inventor:
...the Answer "No" and "Don´t everprompt again"