Hi Balooga,
You may have been bitten by the "60 Saves" bug. Is it your habit to hit
Save every time you breathe? And does the problem only occur after you've
been working on a document for awhile and/or when you have multiple
documents open? If that's the case, you'll need to learn to quit Word
periodically, before you rack up 60 saves. Here's an explanation from a
previous post by John McGhie:
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The "60 saves bug" is actually an "Only a fixed number of unique file
handles are available" bug. A file "handle" is the internal pointer by
which the system identifies a specific file. It does not use the file name,
because it will have multiple pieces of a particular file open. At startup,
an application is supposed to request adequate file handles to cover its
operation, and to release these handles as it no longer needs them. Word
does not ask for enough, and does not release them.
The reason is this: While working on a document, Word saves out multiple
temporary files. These are of many kinds: there are scratch pads where it
puts data while it is moving it. There are undelete files where it stores
the material incase you want to restore it. There are transaction files
where it stores every edit you make, in case you want to undo any of them.
For as long as you have the file open, Word needs to hang onto all of those
files, because it can never tell when you might need one. In fact, if you
have copied any material from the file, Word needs to hold all of those
files open until you quit. The reason is that when you "copy", what you do
is remember an area of text: you do not put that part of the document onto
the clipboard. When you Paste, Word asks the receiving application what
format it wants, and creates it at that point. It needs to go back to the
temporary files and the document to get what it needs to do that. That's
why when you close Word you sometimes see a prompt that says "You placed a
large amount of stuff on the clipboard, do you want to save it for use in
other applications after you quit?" It's lying: there isn't actually
anything in the clipboard yet, it's asking if you want to put it there
If you say yes, it holds onto the file handles of all those temporary files
until you put something else on the clipboard.
Now, Word typically makes far more changes to a file than other
applications, and a Word editing session is typically a lot longer than that
of other applications. So eventually, it is going to run out of file
handles.
One of the reasons I do not get hit with this bug is that I run with "Always
make backup copy" switched ON, I set Auto-recover interval long, and I save
regularly. When you command + s on a file with "always make backup" you
switch the new version of the file for the old and release most of the
temporary files.
By keeping "spare" documents open, what you are doing is hanging onto about
three file handles for each document, even if you have not made any edits to
it. Which means that Word will run out of file handles sooner. But when it
does, by closing the spare document, you release all its file handles. Word
now has a spare file handle and can now proceed to create the temporary
file, and so can save the document. When Word tells you that it cannot
save, what it really means is that it cannot get any more file handles from
the operating system, which will thus not allow it to open any more files.
If it can't do that, it cannot actually make the save, because each save
requires it to create another temporary file.
When you then close Word, you release ALL the file handles, so we can now
rinse and repeat
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hope this helps.
--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP
Mac Word FAQ: <
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>
