Every time I attempt to "update citations & bibliography" it hangs.
I have run it in word safe mode. I have run the pc in safe mode. I have run it without backup, without autosave, without antivirus. I have disabled screensavers. I ran the office repair - no change. All to no avail.
It takes several hours to fall over, and the couple of times I watched the winword process memory usage, i saw it fall over at about the same memory use - about 1.8Gb. This computer still shows only 60% memory used so it's not like it's running out of RAM/swap space. It's behaving like an internal coding hard-limit on memory allocation was reached.
All the event viewer shows me is:
Faulting application winword.exe, version 12.0.6668.5000, stamp 5083137f, faulting module mso.dll, version 12.0.6662.5000, stamp 4fd67dd1, debug? 0, fault address 0x00b12066.
Is anyone else having this issue?
Is this fixed in Word 2010 or 2013?
Does anyone have any suggested workarounds?
Comments: ** Comment from web user: fredtheweasel **
I believe I have diagnosed the cause of this problem - It appears to be __caused by Word's UNDO handling__.
Basically for every single citation update it seems to create an undo entry in the undo stack. In my case each one of these is between 8Mb and 14Mb (I'm guessing the difference relates to the number of times a source is cited in the document). So for 900+ sources, we are looking at an undo stack of 7 to 13 Gigs. Add in the application and document and we are talking about another 45Mb on top. I don't know if there's a finite addressable limit of a 32bit app, but it looks like what's happening is that as the "update citations and bibliography" proceeds, it just creates a HUGE UNDO STACK which eventually exceeds either some internal address limit or operating system limit or physical resources limit (in my case it gets to about 1.8Gb in RAM). Then it falls over. Since it falls over when Task Manager shows I still have plenty of memory left - I think it's an internal limit.
How did I come to this conclusion?
I've spent days researching. I previously tried switching off the autosave - no change.
I monitored the memory use by the process winword.exe while manually updating my citations one at a time. The app with a blank doc takes about 25Mb. Add in my doc and it rises to 45Mb. Edit the first citation - rises to 57Mb, edit next - 69Mb, and so on. I quickly get to 150 or 170Mb before I chicken-out, exit "manage sources," and save the doc. I verify sources.xml is also updated.
SAVE does NOT clear the undo stack - there's no change in memory before and after SAVE.
On the ribbon, the Undo button offers multiple instances of "select bibliography style" even after save.
In older versions of word you could turn off the UNDO function, but it appears from Word 2007 and up you can't. If anyone knows of a way to disable UNDO in Word, that should solve this issue.
On other fora I hear that there has been no significant change in Word 2010 or 2013 in this area.
It's a diagnosis but not a solution.