Excel causes Out of disk space message

[Max Power]

Just started happening. Excel 2000 will give the "out of disk space" message and shut the system down. I am not doing anything elaborate just simple spread sheets. There is about 3GB of space on the hardrive. I ran scandisk and Norton virus scan, both clean. The system works fine besides that.

[Paul Komski]

Couple of Qs first:-
1)Which OS are you using and how much RAM?
2)Is Windows managing memory?
3)Does this happen whenever you use Excel; if you just open certain xls files; or soon after boot up or after you have been using the computer for some time.

It could be a memory leak in Excel like Memory Leak When Excel Calculates User-Defined Functions (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q265023) or a leak caused by another running application altogether. Probably worth getting the Office Service Pack anyways and from add/remove do an Office Repair/Reinstall.

To try to narrow things down, run as few other apps as possible to see if this helps.

You could also run the System Monitor from Accessories and set it to monitor Swapfile Size, Swapfile in Use, Allocated Memory and Kernel Threads.

In particular note the number of threads before starting Excel and see if it returns to this value, when you close Excel. If it doesn't, then this indicates memory leakage. That is to say that memory used by the application is not being released after use.

I'm sure others will have other ideas but more info would be of value.

[Max Power]

Operating system is Win98, with 128mb RAM, windows is managing memory, and the message seems to occur at anytime.

I took almost everything out of the Startup thru Msconfig, so there isnt much running when I ctrl+alt+del. Also I have the Resource Meter loaded and the crash can occur at 80% free.
Service Pak and Repair.....I didn't think of that, let me give that a try.
Thanks for the input.

[sleddog]

This is probably a really dumb idea, but I don't suppose that somehow the 'autobackup' directory that can be set in Excel's options somehow got changed to point to a CD drive or some other non-writable media?

[Dreamboat]

Sounds like a corrupt workbook/worksheet to me.

Still having the problem?

Does it happen in one or several files or in any/all files?

If you're still having the problem, say so, and I'll help you troubleshoot.

[Max Power]

Thanks Dreamboat, sorry for the delay with reply but I was out of commission for a little bit.

It seems that the problem was resolved by updating Office service pak from the Microsoft website.
I have heard of the same symptoms happening with the Nimda virus too. Luckily that wasnt me.