Thursday, 30 June 2016
Microsoft Word 2013 – Insufficient Memory or Disk Space
Recently a client called up saying that they are getting the following error message every time they open up Word:
This error is only appearing on one particular user’s computer (not the entire office) and also when they open Word in Safe Mode, it’s non-existent, which is a good sign. When the client is getting this error message, when they try to close down Word, they also receive the following message:
The strange thing is that this error message only appears when the user gets the “Insufficient memory or disk space” error as well.
After looking into the computer, the first thing I did was to delete the normal.dotm file. This alone didn’t make any difference and the error messages were still coming up. After this, I checked the Add-Ins and disabled all of the add-ins which were originally enabled. With all the add-ins disabled, Word was working perfectly. This obviously now points to an issue with Add-Ins. I ensured that there were no GPOs which were affecting Office (there was but I un-linked them and confirmed the issue was still happening).
Repair of Office didn’t resolve the issue, nor did an uninstall of Office. Sometimes when uninstalling Office, it doesn’t actually remove all files, folders and registry entries which are associated with the application. This could be why the uninstall and reinstall didn’t work. To get around this, you need to run the Microsoft FixIt to obliterate all traces of Office. This can be found here.
After nuking Office, rebooting and then reinstalling, Word was now behaving itself and the add-ins are now working.
