Word XP memory leak!

[nick.campregher]

Dear all,

I have recently come across a strange problem. I have a document with
mixed page orientation. The document is around 20 pages, and 2 of these
pages are landscape orientation, the rest is portrait.

Now, whenever i open this document, the winword.exe process starts
acting strangely. Even when the document is in the background, doing
nothing, the process takes up up to 20% of the CPU load. Furtheremore,
its memory usage continuously increases.

When i edit the document, CPU load goes up to 100%. Memory usage still
increases. As a write this, the cpu load is 17%, and memory usage is
81M. Last time I tried to modify the document, memory usage was 229M,
which brought me to write this.

Needless to say, the program runs fine with all other files, and when I
change the page orientation to all portrait, the problem disappears.

Does anyone have any ideas of what is going on? i should say i have a
common header and footer on all pages, could this be what is causing
problems?

Thank you all for your help.

 

[DbB]

I don't think it's a memory leak.

Instead, I think you simply have a
very complex document that is
requiring additional resources from
your cpu.

It might help to increase the size
of your virtual memory/page file.
And it might help to disable any
additional processes that are being
preloaded at startup but not used.

Also, if you can open that document under
the safemode enviroment without the difficulties
your are encountering in the normal mode enviroment
then we would know that neither the word program
and your complex document is the problem.

 

[nick.campregher]

Thanks for the reply. I will try opening the file in safe mode later (i
am transferring a large file and don't want to disconnect!)

i suggested a memory leak because the memory usage keeps in going up
even though I am not editing or even viewing the file.

In the mean time, I have found a curious trick. If I enter the header
and footer edit environment, the memory increase stops and the CPU load
goes to 0-1%. Interesting?

At this point I would be pretty sure it's to with the resizing of the
header and footer box for the landscape pages.

Any other thoughts?

 

[DbB]

Unfortunately, i don't have any thoughts
as to the oddity. Without having a
first hand view of the document it
would be difficult to determine what
exceeded the parameters of headers
and footers feature.

But one of thepowerful features it provides is
to automatically do a page count, which
in affect is a vb script/macro.

I suppose that I would reconsider
the use of the headers and footer feature
and think of a different method
if there was reason to beleive that the
document would become corrupted.
Maybe substituting the header and footers
with text boxes and manually enter the
page numbers for every page would be
easier on the cpu.

And certainly, if the doc is unstable I would
not send it to anyone. Instead, i would convert
it to mdi or pdf then view the document to ensure
its integrity and send it afterwards prepressed.