Word 2002 Documents with Missing References Not Saving

[Bill Bowen]

Can anyone tell me some information regarding broken references in
Word 2002 documents? We are having issues with documents that contain
missing references that will not save in our environment. More
specifically, the problem is that these documents do not save only
when a third-party Word add-on (Softwise) is loaded in. When we unload
Softwise, the documents can be saved. Even worse, with Softwise loaded
in, Word gives the illusion that the document was saved (status bar on
the bottom goes across) but when you reopen the document, the edits
were lost!

When we took this issue to Softwise they said that the problem was due
to the missing references and those missing references were caused by
a failing in our environment. But I guess my question for the
newsgroup is... Native Word appears to have no problem saving
documents with missing references; why would Softwise tell us that
it's an environment issue? I could not find any definitive writing on
problems with missing references in Word 2002 in the newsgroups or the
web. Like I said, I know they are not healthy for the document, but
can a missing reference cause the document not to be saved? Even more
specifically, should it cause the document not to be saved without
even producing an error message!?

Let me know if anyone has experienced a similar problem or can give me
more advice on missing references and saving?

Thanks

Bill

 

[Rick Stebbins]

Yes, I've seen missing references cause 'Disk is full'
errors and lost edits problems when saving even in Word 97
and 2000. The 'Disk is full' error tends to occur
intermittently for our documents when the attached
template is unavailable, especially if the document was
originally created from a shared network template. I've
seen the problem even after unloading the integration
addin for our document management system.

A document can be saved normally after removing the
missing reference (using the Tools-References menu in
Word's VB Editor). Our missing reference problems dropped
off significantly when we moved our templates onto local
workstations and made sure that all workstations have all
templates.