Word Saving Problem

[Barton]

Upgraded a customer's SBS 2000 server to SBS 2003. Upgraded all computers to
Outlook 2003. Upgraded Act! 6.0 to 9.0 (2007). All installations went well.
Customer uses Office 2000, fully patched.

They use a Word document as a template for property leases. The document has
2 imbedded Excel worksheet objects. They open the template save it as a new
name and continue to edit the new name document, saving frequently as it is a
detailed document. The first several saves work but at some point they
receive an error that states "the disk is full or too many files are open" at
which point you can click ok and then it asks if you would like to retry. If
you answer yes, it gives the error "The disk is full you are trying to write
to....". There are several GB of free disk space. You cannot save the
document as a different name to another location. There is nothing in the
event log of the computer or the server concerning this error. This was
working without error before the upgrades.

I searched the MS knowledge base. Found KB articles 224041 and 830265.
Neither article has a solution for us. Any assistance would be greatly
appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Terry Farrell]

The most common reason for this error message is a partially corrupt
document and the most common cause of that is having FastSaves enabled under
Tools, Options, Save Tab.

But the practice of opening a document and saving it with a new name is also
asking for BIG trouble and may be propagating the corruption. So I suggest
that the 'original' document is cleaned up by first using SaveAs and
selecting RTF. Close the document and Word and then reopen Word and the RTF
version again. Now SaveAs a Word Template .dot file. Save it to a Workgroup
Template folder on the server and give EVERYONE full access permissions but
right-click on the template and assign the Read Only attribute to make sure
no one accidentally changes it. IN Word, set the path for Workgroup
Templates to point at the new server folder making sure to use full UNC
pathname and NOT a mapped drive (i.e. use //servername/foldername... and NOT
F:\folder...)

The staff should now use File, New to open a new document based on the
template. The template will appear in the General tab. If you save the
workgroup template in a subfolder of Templates on the server, the subfolder
name will appear as a new tab in the File, New dialog. This makes it easy to
sort multiple templates into some sort of logical order. But note that the
tabs will not appear in the dialog until there is a template added to the
subfolder (in other words, empty folders don't appear).

The final step I recommend is that all the users' temp folders are cleared
out of abandoned temp files. The folders are usually in Documents and
settings, username, Local, Temp and the folder should be empty when all
applications are closed. SO delete all files found in Temp and you may have
to reboot first to delete some of them.

 

[Barton]

FastSaves was not enabled. I followed the steps outlined and continue to
receive the same error. Today I discovered that if I delete the Excel object,
the file will save so I recreated the object but I continue to receive the
error. It is very strange that it was working well before the upgrades.

Note that multiple computers/users in this office that use this file receive
the same error.

Any addtional assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Terry Farrell]

You have found that the Excel Object is stopping Word from saving? This
suggests that there is something wrong with the Excel Object or the way the
object is being added to the Template.

When this error message occurs, are you able to use SaveAs and select RTF to
save the document?
Are the documents saved locally or to a server folder?
Have all upgrade patches been applied to SBS?
Are you using the ISA part of SBS?
Is the Excel object linked?
Are the Excel objects part of the template or do the users add them?
Do these documents use multiple copy and paste actions?

Terry