"out of memory" when opening Word documents

[Murphy99]

I received an MS Word document attachment of 3.02 MB. When I try to open it
I get the message "There is not enough memory or disk space to complete the
operation". Task manager shows that I have 543MB of memory available (out of
1GB). I have a 60GB hard drive, of which I have 42 plus GB of available
space. I'm running Office 2003 on Windows XP Home edition.

Does anyone have a solution for trouble-shooting this "not enough memory"
problem?

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?TXVycGh5OTk=?=,

I received an MS Word document attachment of 3.02 MB. When I try to open it
I get the message "There is not enough memory or disk space to complete the
operation". Task manager shows that I have 543MB of memory available (out of
1GB). I have a 60GB hard drive, of which I have 42 plus GB of available
space. I'm running Office 2003 on Windows XP Home edition.

Does anyone have a solution for trouble-shooting this "not enough memory"
problem?

Have you first tried saving the attachment to disk, then using Word's File/Open
dialog box? Does that give you any different result?

Also, if you have any documents opened in Word, try saving and closing them all,
before you try opening this document.

If you still get no joy, you should try cleaning out your profile's TEMP folder
(I can't tell you where that is for Windows XP Home, if you can't find it you
may need to ask in Windows XP Home newsgroup.) Also check your "My documents"
folder for files ending in .tmp and starting with ~. If any of these are
present, and Word isn't running, they're likely left over from crashes and
things and should be deleted.

After doing all of this, if you still can't open the document, then it was
probably damaged in transmission. Ask the person who sent it to you to please
compress (ZIP) it before sending it again. You then save it to disk, unzip, and
try to open it.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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