Office 2003 not playing by the rules

[jimbro1000]

One of my users has presented me with an unusual problem, he has a word document with an excel worksheet embedded within it. In isolation both parts work perfectly but together they are causing him (and me) a real headache.

Opening the embedded worksheet to work on it allows you to make changes but as soon as you exit back to word the changes appear to be lost. Open the worksheet again and the changes are still there. Save the lot and reopen it again and the changes are lost although word has recognised that the document was dirty and required a save.

To try and isolate the problem I've created new documents and tried to embed a new sheet into word only to have excel crash out, try to auto recover and then for word to throw its generic 'insufficient memory' error.

The documents that started this problem off are from a previous installation and are happily working on all the other installtions of office that we've tried so it is reasonably safe to say that whatever the problem is, its limited to just one machine. I've checked the offending machine for rogue add-ins, malware, etc. and nothing is showing up. Infact the machine was only recently rebuilt from clean hard drive install so it is somewhat perplexing as to what has happened this time.

The obvious and simple answer is to flatten the machine and rebuild but the downtime is hard to swallow right now and a proper fix would be welcome if anyone has any ideas.

[skylark53]

I would check the virtual memory allocation on this machine (either for Word or per task).

Word with anything in it uses a phenomenal amount of memory (far larger than the size of the embedded object).

I had a similar problem with a Word file that had a lot of images in it, whether or not the images had been compressed. Changing the virtual memory settings did fix it. Furthermore, once this had been done, and I had pasted in replacement copies of the images that were corrupt / would not display, the size of the Word file decreased significantly. And the file was fine, both on the screen and when printed out.

[cluberti]

The only other thing would be if it was on a network share and not local - make sure oplocks on the server hosting the file aren't causing the issue as well.

[jimbro1000]

Thanks for the replies and sorry I couldn't get back to this sooner.

The memory allocation for the word instance is around the 200M mark, substantial but not immense, especially considering the workstation has 3G of memory and an equally substantial swap file.

The file in question is stored locally, the new documents were also created locally so sadly sharing and locks do not seem to be the issue either.