Word 2004 BUG: Disk full when it is not (OsX 10.4.4)

[Quentin]

I found a bug in Word 2004, which is repeatable and hard. When trying to
save a document I have, Word always reports that the disk is full when I
have over 20Gb of space on the disk. This document was produced on a Windows
platform and has many form fields in it. It always fails to save in Word
2004. Is there a fix for this?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

It's always this one document? Perhaps it is corrupt. Try the fixes here
(on a copy).

http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/DocumentCorruption.htm
(hit reload a few times in Safari, if that doesn't work, try Explorer)

 

[Steve Hodgson]

I found a bug in Word 2004, which is repeatable and hard. When trying to
save a document I have, Word always reports that the disk is full when I
have over 20Gb of space on the disk. This document was produced on a Windows
platform and has many form fields in it. It always fails to save in Word
2004. Is there a fix for this?

Is it the infamous bug described at
http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/05/19/135315.aspx? It's a long
read but worth a look.

Cheers,

Steve

 

[Gary Hillerson]

Wow! A well written, amazingly informative article. Thanks for the
link.

I'm doing VBA development in Word 2004 and have gotten this bug more
than once while plugging away at VBA code........which leads me to
wonder if there's another aspect of this bug lurking in the VBA
environment.

g

 

[Quentin]

It's always this one document? Perhaps it is corrupt. Try the fixes here
(on a copy).

Doesn't have anything obvious wrong with it. You can download the document
(it is a job application form) from here (direct link to file)
http://tinyurl.com/8ukan or from the original web page on
http://tinyurl.com/c4cp6

 

[Quentin]

Is it the infamous bug described at
http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/05/19/135315.aspx? It's a long
read but worth a look.

Nope, I think this is a different problem. With my experience of the problem
it is as straight forward and hard as this: I open the file, and try to save
the file immediately with no edits and get disk full.

As a work around, I can open, edit and save this file in NeoOffice and this
had enabled me to complete the form inside it.

If you are interested in looking at the file you can find download the
application pack on this page http://tinyurl.com/c4cp6 . It is the
application form that gives the disk full on Mac Word.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Doesn't have anything obvious wrong with it.

Is it only this one document, or do other documents have problems? You
didn't say.

Why don't you *try* the corruption fixes in case something you can't see has
gone wrong with it? Of course, the error message has gone wrong with it,
so that's one thing. You can make a copy of the doc first, in case you
think the corruption fixes might make it worse.

Here, I'll repeat the link:
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/DocumentCorruption.htm
(hit reload a few times in Safari, if that doesn't work, try Explorer)

You can download the document
(it is a job application form) from here (direct link to file)
http://tinyurl.com/8ukan or from the original web page on
http://tinyurl.com/c4cp6

I'd just as soon not download documents from obscure links, thanks,
especially when you haven't tried everything you can on your machine yet.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Interesting: I have no repro of any error at all on that document (on an OS
10.3.9 system). This is another instance of "Tiger can't save to sever", by
the look of it. Which is the main reason I have not yet upgraded to Tiger


The document has several features that "should" produce errors, or are
"likely" to produce errors. But on this system, no errors.

So Quentin, I think your problem is more likely to be cruft collected in
your temporary storage. Try rebooting OS X to see if that clears it.

Your document has unresolved tracked changes used in conjunction with
numbering. This is the kiss of death: resolve all the changes.

The document also contains tables with borders and text outside the document
margins. This is also a well-known source of document corruption: reset the
document margins so that everything is inside them

Cheers

Yep, I opened the form in the VMS version of Word.
When I went to save it, it gave a different error:
SYS%F%MANAGEMENT DOUBLETHINK POLITICALLY CORRECT CLICHE LIMIT EXCEEDED

Seriously. I can reproduce the behaviour you report.

Even after saving it as HTML and then trying to save the re-opened
result, Word still barfs with the disk full malarkey.
I can't select or edit the boilerplate text. I suspect that it is
exercising a misfeature related to locking all that.

PS that Rick Shout blog is an unintentional damning indictment of the
state of Office Software. How can you go for ten years without looking
at system file limits exceeded? A simple lsof would have shown 'em
that!
On the other hand, this current exploit shows they have not nailed it
yet.

PPS Whichever way you look at it, East Sussex County Council needs that
job filled soonest!

--

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

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Elliott Roper]

Interesting: I have no repro of any error at all on that document (on an OS
10.3.9 system). This is another instance of "Tiger can't save to sever", by
the look of it. Which is the main reason I have not yet upgraded to Tiger

Curioser and curioser.
I rebooted and tried the application form again. Word hung in an
unkillable state on Save as... (Force quit showed Word 'not
responding', then removed it from the list of processes, but the doc
sat there with the spinning pizza of no progress.)
Hopping into the terminal with kill -ABRT for any process with
Microsoft in its name got rid of the window, but left the dock
confused and dazed, with the Word icon still triangled.

I'm about to log out in and if needed, reboot yet again. This does look
like a Tiger specific bug.