Working without a Word work file - Word 2003 / Outlook 2003

[scoobydoo]

A customer of mine has developed a problem on two of their Windows XP
Professional machines running Office 2003 Professional SP3.(I have
re-installed Office and cleared their local profiles, removed all the content
of their respective Temp folders and deleted the Normal.dot.)

Also they had started to use C:\OLKxx folders for their Outlook temporary
folders - have amended their registry to point them back to default locations
- this fixed issues with opening attachments etc but they still have the
following problem popping up intermittently when in Word directly or via
Outlook:

...working in Word and I got ‘you are working without a Word work file and
memory is nearly full. Save your work’. But it wouldn’t let me save and I
had to manually switch off computer.

...replying to an e-mail with only Outlook open. I clicked on reply and was
taken to Word with the usual box 'you are working without a Word work file
and memory is nearly full. Save your work’ I closed Word which took me back
to Outlook with the usual box 'Microsoft Word is set to be your e-mail editor
etc.'

These machines have stacks of RAM @ 2x 512mb sticks installed.
The ‘My Documents’ folder is redirected to a server share.

Please don’t point me at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=302629

Any help or advice would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Why is My Documents redirected to a server share? It's a crazy idea. Open
Tools, Options, File Locations Tab and change the default for Documents to
the shared server folder. Remove the redirect.

 

[scoobydoo]

Hi Terry thanks for the prompt reply - I don't quit follow your idea of
redirecting the 'My Documents' folder being a crazy idea. If you redirect
this folder the office applications automatically follow...in anycase the
folder has been redirected to a server share for years without any problems.
The users share and work on the document store and nothing is kept locally on
their machines. They use roaming profiles also by the way. Please explain
your thoughts if you think the redirection has a baring on the problem. Kind
regards. Paul

 

[Terry Farrell]

Why is a redirect crazy? Well if you buy a car do you ignore the steering
wheel and bolt on a rudder? Word has built in path settings and these can be
set when Office is deployed. Using roaming profiles ands storing documents
and templates centrally on a server is absolutely normal. But using redirect
to divert My Documents to the server is not.

Terry

 

[scoobydoo]

Hmm Terry I totally disagree – with your analogy and understanding of
setting folder paths within the application rather than using redirect would
make you a very busy person in at my last site. With some 36,000+ desktops
across 113 sites configured to redirect the ‘My Documents’ folder via group
policy and with the application following as I mentioned earlier being the
norm and indeed the only way of doing it –

A quick google search produced a technet document from 2003 =>
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windo...05ca-41be-9887-33acc87a20561033.mspx?mfr=true

If you (or anyone else) have any ideas as to why the problem is occurring on
the two machines I would be interested to hear – as it is I expect I am
heading towards a rebuild very shortly.

Regards

 

[Terry Farrell]

The point is that you set the default document path when you deploy Office
and not do a bog standard install and use redirect to correct the oversight.

Meanwhile, have you deleted the Word DataKey in the registry?
Does this happen regardless of which user is logged on to the workstations
(even an Admin)?
Does it happen if you start Word in Safe Mode (using the /a switch)?

Terry

 

[scoobydoo]

Hi Terry

No but I thought doing remove and reinstall would have dealt with any
problems in that direction - to be honest I have not had the time to try in
safe mode - so I will delete the key and see how they get on - thanks. In old
Office (97) versions there used to be registry cleaners - is there such a
thing for Office 2003 - I have not found anything yet.

 

[Terry Farrell]

There certainly used to be an eraser2000.exe that cleaned out all the last
vestiges of an Office 2000 uninstall, but I am not sure I have seen one for
Office 2003.

Sometimes starting with the /a switch is sufficient to sort out the DataKey,
but more often than not it is necessary to delete it (Word creates a new one
as soon as it is restarted).

Terry

 

[scoobydoo]

Hi Terry
Deleted the DataKey on the machines and the problem continued. Rebuilt the
machines totally this weekend and delivered them back this morning, re-join
them to the domain only to have them go wrong again with the same thing -
message from end user:

Red circle X Microsoft Office Word
You are working without a work file and
memory is
Nearly full. Save your work

I then went to send this email to you and outlook said

"Microsoft Word is set to be your email editor, however, word is
unavailable, not installed or is not the same version as outlook. the
outlook email editor will be used instead"

I'm now looking server side but can't see what would cause this sort of
problem - I'm begining to think that maybay some recent MS Updates are to
blame as there weren't any problems for the last couple of years then we
applied the updates from the end of January and things started to fail. The
rebuild machines were totally upto date with all patches applied. Cheers Paul

 

[Terry Farrell]

This seems crazy from a new rebuild: I'll cogitate this over night and see
if I can think of what to try next.

Terry

 

[scoobydoo]

Thanks Terry
One thing I have noticed this evening is that the server is running low on
virtual memory and suffering high CPU - more memory on order which will keep
me and the server happier but as for the problem I'm not sure....
Cheers
Paul

 

[jr_burton]

Thanks Terry
One thing I have noticed this evening is that the server is running low on
virtualmemoryand suffering high CPU - morememoryon order which will keep
me and the server happier but as for the problem I'm not sure....
Cheers
Paul





- Show quoted text -

Hi Paul,

Did you find a solution to this? We have had the same problem since
these updates. We have tried all the fixes you have tried to no avail.
Its starting to effect more and more users everyday.

cheers

James

 

[Paul C - Southampton UK]

Hi James - I thought I had but no, late today I had a message from one the
user to say that it had happend again -

I did find that the server they were using was very low on memory <1gb and
heavily fragmented. Increased the memory on the server to 3gb and defragged
it and it looked much happier. It was throwing up virtual memory low
messages etc I thought it may have remote baring on the problem. I think it
is going to have to be a support call soon.....Terry any further thoughts?

Cheers

:
Hi Paul,

Did you find a solution to this? We have had the same problem since
these updates. We have tried all the fixes you have tried to no avail.
Its starting to effect more and more users everyday.

cheers

James

 

[Terry Farrell]

Other than the DataKey, I'm not sure what else it can be other than possibly
a corrupt Profile. Have you tried logging in using the Administrator profile
on the workstations having the problem?

Terry

 

[Richard Crozier]

Hi,

I have been seeing the same problem for multiple users n Terminal Services.
Office 2003 on windows server 2003. It appears in our case that the message
only relates to word, and only when there are tables in the document.
Still no furhter towards fixing it though.

Richard Crozier

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi Richard,

Where are your Windows environment variables for TMP= and TEMP= pointing?
Are they to valid locations and do users have full control on those locations?

============
Hi,

I have been seeing the same problem for multiple users n Terminal Services.
Office 2003 on windows server 2003. It appears in our case that the message
only relates to word, and only when there are tables in the document.
Still no furhter towards fixing it though.

Richard Crozier >>
--

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*

 

[tehtechie]

Hi Paul,

Didyoufind a solution to this? We have had the same problem since
these updates. We have tried all the fixesyouhave tried to no avail.
Its starting to effect more and more users everyday.

cheers

James

Our work environment is now starting to experience this issue since
the most recent updates. We too are getting the "you are working
without a Word workfile" on approximately 40 machines. We've been
fighting all week to come up with something... and all we have come up
with is to assign the affected users "Power User" rights on their
machines. It's permission related, but how/where/why?

 

[Paul C - Southampton UK]

Hi Guys

Still having problems...I have tried changing the TMP & TEMP environment
variables but this had effect on the problem. I will have to try the 'Power
User' tweak now and see what happens. Is there anything we can run that will
capture the failure - I have sysinternals regmon and filemon and suppose I
could run these and force a user to produce a failure - does Microsoft
actually pick up on any of these issues from here? cheers

 

[field.noel]

We have encountered this issue in some labs that are running Word
2003(sp3) on XP(sp2) in a Server 2003 AD domain. We have drastically
restricted the users' rights to these computers. These users are not
in a position to be assigned rights as "power users". They can use
Word normally for a while, then a dialog displays informing the user,
"Word could not create the work file. Check the temp environment
variable." The user is able to continue working but shortly
thereafter receives the, "working without a Word work file..." error.
I'm guessing I just have the restrictions too tight, but I need to
know exactly what to change, because, as I mentioned, these users
cannot be given more permissions.

Noel Vincent Field

 

[tehtechie]

I agree with you about not giving power users to restricted users. We
don't want to do this either, but as a workaround, it has been
absolutely necessary. Some of the users impacted simply cannot go
without doing their daily work, like in finance, human resources
etc...

One of my co-workers is in the process of working with Microsoft
Premier Support. No matter where we find the solution, I'll be sure
that if premier support tells us, I'll post it here.