problem with "The save failed due to out of memory or disk space"

[Jan Wagner]

Hi,

this happens occasionally, Word 97 (and even 2003) say that "The save
failed due to out of memory or disk space" and I can't save the
currently open document anywhere, not under a different name nor in a
different folder.

Strangely there are still many tens of gigs of disk space free, and
memory plus XP page file are definitely not full or at the limit. The
folder with the document contains about 1,5gigs worth of Word's own
~WRL4052.tmp etc files, but considering the free disk space should fit
many times more.

I've checked Google, and Word settings, but can't find where to tell
Word not to use those ~WRL4052.tmp files. With the current document,
there's about 120 of these (1,5gigs total). Not sure if these might be
causing this prob - maybe changing Word ~*.tmp settings would help. Any
ideas? Or is there some other solution to the "save failed" problem?
(Autosave is already disabled, by the way).

Basically, with large documents (~20megs) I can save them maybe 40
times, until Word hits some kind of internal limit (?) and gives this
error, and must then be restarted to be able to save anything.
Restarting Word will cause me to loose some of the newest changes to the
document... :-| This has been getting quite annoying lately, with larger
docs to edit... All tips appreciated!

thanks,
- Jan

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Jan,

Yes, the temp files can be the problem. The article at
http://www.gmayor.com/what_to_do_when_word_crashes.htm describes how
to clean them up.

The "out of memory or disk space" error message is often a catch-all
for "something is wrong but I don't know what it is".

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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