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BUG: Update Citations and Bibliography Crashes - Word in Office 365, same issue as in Word 2007

I have a large document with approximately 900 references/sources.

Every time I try to update Citations and Bibliography, it crashes.

eventviewer shows:
Faulting application winword.exe, version 15.0.4517.1505, stamp 51bfe4f8, faulting module mso.dll, version 15.0.4517.1508, stamp 51dc5c12, debug? 0, fault address 0x00fedd9a.

Based on my previous research, the problem stems from the way the citations engine generates a HUGE UNDO STACK. You can watch the winword process take up ever more memory, over the course of about 4 hours, until at about 1.6 to 1.8Gb it falls over. Of course it never commits, so when the document is recovered it is as it was before.

I'm running win7 64bit on a i5 processor, 6Gb RAM, approx 240Gb free disk. Word has minimal add-ins and Physical Memory is only about 50% used when it fails. I don't think it's a disk space / RAM amount Issue. Since it fails when there is apparently plenty of free memory and disk, there must be some other internal limit.

This problem has existed since Word 2007 - see my previous discussion here and here.

I paid the money and upgraded to Office 365 in the hope it would alleviate the problem I have been having with Word 2007. But it didn't.

A work-around would be to switch off the Undo function temporarily, but there appears to be no way to do that.

This is a pretty terminal bug - I can't feasibly update my citations manually. Consequently the citations numbers in my document don't necessarily match the citations in the bibliography - rendering the entire citation idea useless. I hope someone at Microsoft will pay attention to Word citations which seems to have been the poor relation of the MS Word project.


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Is the issue related to a particular file document or are you facing the issue with all document you have created.

 

 

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It's one file, that I have been working on for a couple of years. I am not alone with this problem, and it is a problem that persists from word 2007. In other words, I doubt it's a corrupt file but I am willing to try most things at this point.

see this post and this post for others with same issue.

As I said before, you can watch the winword process gobbling up memory as it works laboriously through the update. It's clearly creating an undo stack entry for each updated citation, then running out of allocated memory. For fuller explanation of the diagnosis see my previous discussion here and here.

If there is a way to turn off the undo function, I predict that will 'solve' this issue.

I put 'solve' in quotes because really the way the citations function is coded does need a serious overhaul. It needs to become more efficient handling XSL it needs a much better source manager dialog box, it needs to support superscript citations (currently I have to run a macro to get that!) and first and foremost it needs to be written so it doesn't crash!!!

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Update: It is NOT the undo stack, unless word maintains a different undo stack that that addressable via a macro.

With the help of Yves at Bibword I ran a macro which updates the citations one at a time, but clearing the undo stack each time.

The winword process still grew steadily from 39Mb over 3hours and 40 minutes until it crashed, with winword at about 1.1Gb. Memory on the computer was showing only 62% utilized.

Adding a line in the macro to save at every update shows that Word only processes 308 citations before crashing. The Macro stops at the document save line with a file permissions error. The Word window reports "the disk is full etc" yet I show 287 GB free. The word window is titled ~WRL3153.tmp but searching for that file comes up blank.

So we know the memory bloating isn't the undo stack. The memory bloat isn't killed by saving. So what on earth is swelling the Word memory allocation and also its temp file so much? A massive memory leak?

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It's not a corrupt file:

I should have said: I have had this problem occur in maybe 10 different files. But they were all derived from the same file, though (via word 'save as' or copying the file).

So...

In final desperation I created a brand new vanilla word doc within Word 365. I then copied and pasted from my old doc to this new one, chapter by chapter. I then used side-by-side to compare and make sure nothing got screwed up in the copy. Curiously the new file is slightly smaller than the old file even though the content is identical (new is 574kb, old was 801kb).

So I set it going on "update citations and bibliography" again and the new file crashed again 2h 45 min later, winword process at 1.6Gb.

So I have to manually update every single reference. Kind of defeats the point of having a citation manager in the first place.

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Does anyone from Microsoft check these postings?? Is there any point in posting here?

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Does anyone from Microsoft check these postings?? Is there any point in posting here?

http://blogs.technet.com/b/arykhus/archive/2008/12/11/finding-useful-crash-data-and-windows-error-reporting-wer.aspx

Provide the crash report and will try to check what can be done.

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That link you provided seems to be for vista, so I struggled to apply it to Win7.  It referred to eventviewer (see below) and troubleshooting - which didn't take me anywhere useful in win7.

I provided the crash report to MS every time I got the "Word encountered a problem" dialog.

It definitely seems to be something to do with memory bloating - you can watch the winword process bloating as it goes. Interestingly, manually editing citations one-by-one creates the same memory bloat and has crashed word for me also.

The event viewer messages are below. If you need me to post other info, let me know.

Faulting application winword.exe, version 15.0.4535.1000, stamp 51de6fa2, faulting module mso.dll, version 15.0.4535.1002, stamp 51f75346, debug? 0, fault address 0x01000102.

Faulting application winword.exe, version 15.0.4517.1505, stamp 51bfe4f8, faulting module mso.dll, version 15.0.4517.1508, stamp 51dc5c12, debug? 0, fault address 0x00fedd9a.

Faulting application winword.exe, version 15.0.4517.1505, stamp 51bfe4f8, faulting module mso.dll, version 15.0.4517.1508, stamp 51dc5c12, debug? 0, fault address 0x00fedd9a.

Faulting application winword.exe, version 15.0.4517.1505, stamp 51bfe4f8, faulting module mso.dll, version 15.0.4517.1508, stamp 51dc5c12, debug? 0, fault address 0x00fedd9a.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...and many more like that...

to reiterate: I'm fully up to date with patches, running office 365 - but it's the same problem as word 2007; I ran office repair (in 2007), tried in office safe mode, tried in windows safe mode, tried altering pagefile settings to make a massive page file, I tried running without virus, backup and any other nonessential software, I have purged .tmp files. I have restarted many times. I have run chkdsk. I removed add-ins. I turned off automatic saves. I created a new document and pasted content in to rule-out corrupted doc isues, I have gone through every single source to check for "special characters" in all but the URL field. I have attempted to bypass the problem with a macro. All to no avail. It takes hours, bloats memory (even with killing the undo stack), then crashes. Every single time.

see related post here 

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it's still crashing....

even a 16 page doc with vastly fewer citations crashes.

So it crashes across word/office versions from 2007 to office 2013/365

hosted on operating systems from win7, win8, and win8.1

when is this issue going to be fixed??

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Call once and report the same directly yo MS.
Trying to be helpful.

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FIXED (kinda) in 64 bit edition of word!

I eventually found a phone number and got through to MS tech support. Uninstalled office 365. Re installed the 64 bit edition of Office 365 (MS hide this under the "languages and advanced options" link). Ran Update citations and bibliography on the problem doc. It ran for 3 hours and I watched the winword process go up to 3.2 Gb for a while. 

But it completed WITHOUT CRASHING!!

Therefore it is the memory limit in the 32 bit app that is making it fall over, BUT there has to be a smarter way to code this transaction both from a memory use standpoint and a performance standpoint.

Along the way, MS confirmed that the renaming the undo via a macro does not in fact disable the undo stack in word versions post 2003, so I was on-the-money blaming the bloated undo stack.

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Last updated August 31, 2023 Views 3,988 Applies to: