Re: cannot save file - disk full error?

In article <C3077639.827C%john@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
John McGhie <john@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Robert:

On 7/09/07 1:37 AM, in article
missinglink-890FDB.11370106092007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "RobertB"
<missinglink@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


About time to update the error message, isn't it?

Well, yeah, except: what would they update it to?

"Word can't figure out what to do with this file?"

Or even "Sorry, I am suffering Old Timer's Disease ? what were we talking
about??"

Reminds me of those old "out of memory" errors one used to see in days
gone by. However, I've seen disk full errors even as far back as Windows
3.1 -- bogus disk full errors.

Yep. Exactly the same thing: it's a generalised "write failure" with no
specific cause.

Airport? I don't use Airport on this iMac, but I'm a couple of Airport
Extreme updates behind (since the machine has an Airport card).

Try the update: It may change something in the networking software that
resolves the problem.

And how on earth is Airport networking related to Word's view of the
file system?

As I understand it, that issue was caused by an unset bit in the
flow-control message coming back to the OS. Because Word is "streaming" the
file to disk, it does it as a series of blocks. I think it waits for a
checksum on each block before sending the next.

The first version of the Airport Base Station firmware was one component
that would produce this error in Word.

I don't have an Airport Base Station, however. And that is one weird
error.


I am right out of ideas on this bug: I am just suggesting we stir things up
a little in the faint hope that we can get something to "change" :-)

That box is unchecked. When I opened the document, the template was
simply listed as Normal. However, there are lots of styles in this
document, none of which I created (I should also add that this file came
from a European office using Windows of some flavor -- and it's in
French).

If it is using "funny fonts" or "strange characters" Word may be polling for
the PRINTER looking for the font metrics. The communication failure may be
to the printer, not the document or its template.

Let's "Maggie" that document and see if that fixes it...

Who's "Maggie?"


1) Carefully copy everything EXCEPT the last paragraph mark in the
document, then close it.

I can try. The document is about 87 pages long. Not that big though,
only about 1 MB in size with the graphics.


2) Create a new blank document and paste into it.

3) Save that to a new file name and see if that document behaves correctly.

That re-creates multiple look-up tables within the document structure.
Let's take a walk on the wild side here: the first thing Word does when it
tries to save a file is to resolve the editing in the file and clean up the
internal structure. If the internal structure is too complex, Word can fail
to clean it up. It then leaves whatever it didn't like in the file because
it doesn't understand what it is, and so is too scared to delete it in case
it's important. It may be that Word's attempt to resolve the code in the
document is taking so long that the save process fails on a time-out.

Word itself didn't appear to be hung, however. Least as far as I can
tell. Although I didn't do much checking at the time to look at CPU
usage.


The Maggie manoeuvre forces reconstruction of the document so that the
cleanup process can complete.

Told you I was running out of ideas...

Cheers

--
"Never believe anything until it's officially denied."
.