I'm addressing Omar here because I know he reads this list, and because
anyone using Entourage also has Word 2001 and may encounter the problem I
did. I've also posted this to the Word-Mac list with no response, and I
posted it on the MS trouble-shooting web page (some comments on that below).

I thought that with OS 9.04 and Office 2001 I would be safe from the
infamous "disk full" error in Word, but I was wrong. It struck today, with a
vengeance.

I had been working on a single document for a better part of the day. I had
six windows open in Word. I'd saved the document multiple times (I have
autosave on for every five minutes).

Suddenly, as I attempted to save for the last time before quitting for the
day, the "Disk full" error came up. A second attempt told me too many files
were open. (Over 8000 and some files? Come on!) The title bar on the window
changed to "Word Work File blah-blah". I was able, after closing the other
five windows and quitting another app that was open, to save the Work file.

When I got out and quit everything but Finder, I checked and found that I no
longer had a single copy of the file I'd spent the day working on!! There
was no file bearing its name anywhere on my hard drive. Word had not only
failed to save the file, it had erased the earlier copy I had saved!!

I tracked down the work file. It did contain the most recent version of my
work and I was able to recover it, but this would have utterly confused the
hell out of someone with less experience than myself.

How on earth can Word be running out of files or disk space??? (Oh, yeah; I
have 1.3 gigabytes of free space on my hard drive.)

Remarks:

When reporting this to the MS web site, I followed a link to their
"knowledge base" to see if there were any articles posted about this
problem. I was dumbfounded to discover that not only could I not find any
article about such a problem in the current version, I could not find a
single article that even acknowledged the WIDELY KNOWN problem Word 98 had
with a false "disk full or too many files open" error under the Mac OS prior
to 9.0. That problem was very simple: the Mac OS limited open files to
something like 256, and Word, when kept open for a long time with frequent
saving, created hundreds of temporary files without ever closing them, so
that eventually you ran out of the open file limit. OS 9 increased the limit
on open files to something over 8000, I believe. In addition, I'd read
somewhere that Word had been improved so that it no longer needlessly opened
so many files and kept them open. Yet, somehow, Word 2001 has managed to
reproduce the problem!!

Omar, please tell me you guys know about this and are working on it!

I simply cannot believe that MS product support is unaware of this problem,
and that there are no articles about it in the knowledge base. This single
disappointing experience with that service totally destroys any confidence I
might have had in finding useful information there.
-- 
Allen Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> XNS name: =Allen Watson
A Mac family since 1984
My web page: <http://home.earthlink.net/~allenwatson/>


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