problem saving with Microsoft Word in Office 2004 on G5 with 10.3.7 OSX

[John McGhie]

Hi Ken:

Yes, that's very helpful, I will forward it in to the Developers.

We did have some problems getting things working on the dual CPU machines,
but I thought we fixed everything in beta test before we shipped Office
2004.

I think I am right in saying that Office Mac X was not designed for a
dual-processor box, and is likely to play up on it and there's not likely to
be any way to fix that.

The "Serious Error" error and the "Disk Full" error are two different
problems with two different causes.

The "Serious Error" problem means that Word can not find, or can not write
to, the file it *was* using. The "Disk Full" error means Word can not
create a new file.

It sounds to me if something the Dual CPU boxes are doing is "closing"
Word's work file before Word has finished with it. Under those
circumstances, Word would not be able to find the file because it is no
longer there, even though it was writing to it a minute a go! It *might*
help to set your AutoRecovery Save period to a shorter value. This would
cause transactions to occur to the work files more regularly and "remind"
the OS that these files are still in use. Then again, it may simply produce
the same problem earlier and more frequently.

The Disk Full error will happen a lot less often if you shutdown your
computer every day when you go home. I do a "Restart" instead of a "Log
Out" when I go home. That means that next day I start work on a
freshly-booted OS. That seems to cure a lot of OS X "quirks".

Hope this helps

Hello, John.

I'm new to this thread, but I came here looking for a solution to the
same behavior in Word.
So I'll share my experience FWIW.
Periodically, while working on a Word Mac X document, Word will report
"serious error" with "Word Work File D_####".

I don't have a RAID, but I do have a G5 (dual 1.8 GHz) running 10.3.7
with file sharing on.
I'm running Office Mac X v. 10.1.6, and Allow Fast Saves un-checked
(learned that long ago).

I occasionally experience the "too many files open" error, especially
if I work the entire day and into the evening without quitting Word,
with file sharing on. I don't think I've ever experienced the "too many
files" error when File Sharing was off. But this problem is different.

With this new alert box, if I dismiss the alert then Command-S to Save
works fine (unlike the "too many files open" error). The first time I
experienced it (fairly recently, within the last couple weeks -- so it
may have something to do with 10.3.7 and/or Office X update 10.1.6) I
quit Word and deleted all the Word Work files I could find, repaired
permissions. BTW, I could not find a Word Work file with the same
number in its name as listed in the alert. Then after a day or so it
happened again. Then I did the same thing, and also deleted Word's
Normal template.

It's happened a couple times again since then, but only rarely. Today
when it happened I quit Word and used the Finder's "Find" command to
find files with "Word Work" in the name both visible and invisible. I
found only two, both invisible, both in
/private/tmp/501/TemporaryItems, one with a "modified" date of 8/23/04
and another with a "modified" date of today, 1/16/03. However, the
precise file name from the alert didn't appear; I suspect it was
deleted when I quit Word.

I suspect some minor conflict involving 10.3.7 and MS Office.
I'm going to turn off file sharing for the rest of the afternoon and
see what happens. Will report.
Hope this info is helpful.

Ken

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Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[drdocument]

Hi, John.

Thanks a lot for the info. Very informative.
I note that this topic originally discussed Office 2004 and I'm using
Office X. Perhaps I'll look into an upgrade. However, aside from these
few "Serious Error" events, both before and after applying the Office
10.1.6 update (and an occasional "Disk Full" error if I work too long),
Office X has been very stable on my G5.

FYI, I just had the "Serious Error" again, after having turned off File
Sharing right after my earlier post.

I work from home, and my G5 runs 24/7, but I do shut down all
applications when I quit for the day. My machine does not sleep, but
the monitor does. I run Tech Tool Pro from eDrive weekly. And my system
is *very* stable, no freezes or kernel panics.

Do you think I can safely delete the two invisible Word Work files?

Ken

 

[drdocument]

Hello, all. Replying to myself, here, but I have new info.

Just on a hunch, I un-checked "Active Virus Detection" in the
preferences of Virex 7.5, and haven't experienced the "Serious Error"
event since, about 5 hours ago.

I've been using Word X on G5 dual 1.8, OS 10.3.7, all day. I
experienced the "Serious Error" three or four times before changing the
Virex prefs, but since then Word has been behaving itself.

Ken

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Ken:

That's well worth knowing. I am also getting less than fond of Norton AV
which also causes issues on this iBook.

In relation to your other post: Yes, you can safely delete any Word work
files you find if Word is not running. If Word is running, it won't let you
delete the ones it is actually using.

You missed my point with doing a reboot: OS X does a series of housekeeping
tasks on system start. For a happy life, I would reboot every so often: it
will clean up things like the TEMP files and the system paging files.

Of course, you could do the Unix System Admin command-line thingy and
schedule chron jobs to do these tasks automatically. I find it simpler to
reboot every week or so rather than figure out how

Cheers

Hello, all. Replying to myself, here, but I have new info.

Just on a hunch, I un-checked "Active Virus Detection" in the
preferences of Virex 7.5, and haven't experienced the "Serious Error"
event since, about 5 hours ago.

I've been using Word X on G5 dual 1.8, OS 10.3.7, all day. I
experienced the "Serious Error" three or four times before changing the
Virex prefs, but since then Word has been behaving itself.

Ken

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[drdocument]

That's well worth knowing. I am also getting less than fond of
Norton AV

which also causes issues on this iBook.

In relation to your other post: Yes, you can safely delete any Word work
files you find if Word is not running. If Word is running, it won't let you
delete the ones it is actually using.

You missed my point with doing a reboot: OS X does a series of housekeeping
tasks on system start. For a happy life, I would reboot every so often: it
will clean up things like the TEMP files and the system paging files.

Of course, you could do the Unix System Admin command-line thingy and
schedule chron jobs to do these tasks automatically. I find it simpler to
reboot every week or so rather than figure out how

Thanks, John. I do in fact reboot at least weekly when I do my regular
maintenance. I use Tech Tool Pro and I particularly like (and use) it's
eDrive feature, which allows me to reboot without booting from a CD/DVD
(which is much slower) or firing up my external hard drive (which is
annoyingly noisy). My G5 runs 24/7 so I the system maintenance tasks
get run as scheduled; I run MacJanitor weekly on my TiBook. It would be
really handy if the system would run cron system maintenance tasks at
any reboot; that would be a help for those to shut down and startup
daily.

It's interesting that disabling Virex's active checking feature
apparently solved the Word "serious disk error" problem. As I recall
there were apps which misbehaved with Norton Anti-Virus' active
checking feature as well. I wish Virex would ignore previously-verified
and unchanged files like NAV, but Virex comes with dot-Mac so I use it.
I've read that Virex 7.5 is problematic for some, but it's been okay
for me, especially now.

I too have become a bit disenchanted with Norton. A while back I
applied a Norton updater which ended up being problematic (should have
waited a couple days) and had to reconstruct my entire drive. Ever
since then I've mistrusted them, and I've read even more about problems
with Norton software in OS X.

I'm trying to find the cash to update to Office 2004. Any special
cautions?

Have a great day!

Ken

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Ken:

I'm trying to find the cash to update to Office 2004. Any special
cautions?

Read the README! All of it!!

I am a big fan of using the Installer to ensure files get copied to the
correct locations, but drag-and-drop also works well for a complete install.

If you wanted to be sure of getting a clean install, you would move all of
your existing templates out of site (into a folder named something else and
outside of the Microsoft Office folder) before installing. If you leave the
existing templates where they are, Office will find them and use them
instead of replacing them with clean copies. The upside is that you then
get to keep all of your customisations. The downside is that if there are
any corruptions, you get to keep those too. I am a big fan of starting
clean, having placed my existing templates where the installer can't find
them, I can then choose what to restore later.

But if I had not said anything here, and you had simply gone ahead and
closed your eyes and pulled the trigger, I am practically certain that you
will get a successful and stable installation Both the product and its
installation are very glitch-free this time around.

It's nice to have the Applications Folder and the user's Home folder on the
same volume as the operating system, but not necessary: you can work around
it if that's inconvenient.

Cheers

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I'm trying to find the cash to update to Office 2004. Any special
cautions?

A couple known bugs involving very long documents (in cross-references and
spellchecking), which many people never notice.

 

[Clive Huggan]

And make sure you download and install Service Release 1 to Office 2004 --
it solved a few problems, one being a horrific glitch when you wanted to
drag leftwards to a lower line of text when selecting.

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 5 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
============================================================

 

[JasonRomney]

Ken,
You appear to be a genius because switching off "Active Virus
Detection" seems to have solved my Word save problem as well. If I turn
on Active Virus Detection I get the "serious error" message recurring,
and when I turn off Active Virus Detection, I am unable to trigger the
problem no matter, it would seem, how many times I save a document.
Well done! Someone should let Virex know that it needs to fix this
bug...
Kind regards and thanks again.
Jason Romney

 

[drdocument]

Thanks, Jason, but I don't think I can really take credit for that one.
Someone else suggested it a few years back when I was using Norton
Anti-Virus, and it just fell out of the dark recesses of my memory.

I will say that I haven't experienced problems with any other
applications saving files with Active Virus Detection enabled, so there
might be some relationship to underlying I/O routines in Office as
well, but I'm not a programmer so that's only speculation.

As long as there seem to be some knowledgeable folks here, though, I'd
beg your indulgence for one other diversion, a real puzzler:

Every once every few weeks Word X will create a one-inch square blank
window in the upper left corner of the screen, behind Word's toolbars,
abutting the left side of the monitor and the bottom of the Mac menu
bar, which cannot be closed. Quitting and re-launching makes it go
away. This behavior has appeared through all versions of OS X, on my G4
Cube as well as the G5 (but interestingly not on my PowerBooks). I've
done a clean reinstall of Office, including creating new templates, and
everything in between, but it still recurs periodically. Any ideas?
Thanks,

Ken

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Ken:

Sorry: I can't remember what causes your new problem. I'm on an iBook so I
have never seen it. Try re-naming your Normal template.

Re-post your question in a new thread: someone will remember.

All: One subject per thread. People won't look at a thread once it has
answers unless you give it a new subject.

Cheers

Thanks, Jason, but I don't think I can really take credit for that one.
Someone else suggested it a few years back when I was using Norton
Anti-Virus, and it just fell out of the dark recesses of my memory.

I will say that I haven't experienced problems with any other
applications saving files with Active Virus Detection enabled, so there
might be some relationship to underlying I/O routines in Office as
well, but I'm not a programmer so that's only speculation.

As long as there seem to be some knowledgeable folks here, though, I'd
beg your indulgence for one other diversion, a real puzzler:

Every once every few weeks Word X will create a one-inch square blank
window in the upper left corner of the screen, behind Word's toolbars,
abutting the left side of the monitor and the bottom of the Mac menu
bar, which cannot be closed. Quitting and re-launching makes it go
away. This behavior has appeared through all versions of OS X, on my G4
Cube as well as the G5 (but interestingly not on my PowerBooks). I've
done a clean reinstall of Office, including creating new templates, and
everything in between, but it still recurs periodically. Any ideas?
Thanks,

Ken

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410