Bad Allocation

[benlev@aol.com]

This program is so unstable. I do 60 page documents with about 8 or so figures in each and I can't keep this program up. Most of the problem happen during editing after the report is done. Often crashing while doing "accept or reject changes". Lately, when it does crash (and I save every 10 seconds) when it reopens I get the message. "Bad Allocation". If I quit completely the document will come back.

Any clue as to what is going on? I'm almost desperate enough to start using Microsoft Word.

[RusselB]

First off, is you're still using OpenOffice 3.0, please consider upgrading. There have been many changes to AOO since 3.0
A common fix for problems that are difficult to impossible to determine the cause of, is the resetting of the OpenOffice User Profile
A 60 page document is not a very big document. I'm not sure what you are referring to as "figures" in the Writer document, possibly due to the fact that I use Calc a lot more and in Calc figures refers to the numbers entered.

[benlev@aol.com]

I'm using 4.1.5

When I say "Figures" I simply mean screen captures that are make from screen captures and saved as PNG files. These are generally small (4" x 6" is typical). I insert these into the report through out the report by using "Insert > Picture > From File". I add a caption and sometimes a frame. Nothing fancy. The rest is just text.

To accept changes I simply use Edit > Change > Accept or Reject. It often crashes while reviewing edits.

When I generate the Table of Contents and Table of Figures I get weird stuff. The table of figure will show 110 figures. 100 will all be Figure 2 or 3 or something. When I go find that figure and delete the figure I find a second one under that one. And deleting that I find still another. And so it goes. I only inserted the figure once.

It was worse when I tried to paste figures into the document. I don't do that any more.

I hope this helps. Any thoughts?

[keme]

One thought: Windows XP is not safe for internet use any more. There may be unpublished vulnerabilities which are exploited.

Edit: If your signature does not represent your current system, please update the sig. (see "User control panel" link towards the top left corner of the forum page), and disregard what follows in the rest of my reply.

If you must use that computer with an internet connection, and an OS upgrade is not a viable option for you, please check your computer for malware. Malwarebytes still supports WinXP if you are running 32 bit version (which most people do).

Also, there are (or at least there were) many XP mods out there, some of which interfere with software operation. Do you have any "XP skins", active desktop applets or other system "enhancements" installed?

Some titles which have caused problems, with XP in particular:

• Championship Manager (mostly font substitutions which made crap of your output, can't recall that it ever caused stability issues)
• Kingsoft Office (now WPS Office) had some versions where registry keys conflicted. Caused instability when DDE/OLE links were active.
• Some password cracking software also caused instability (may have been Cain & Abel, but I'm not quite sure)

[Bidouille]

I'm using 4.1.5

OK and what about RusselB suggests:

is the resetting of the OpenOffice User Profile

[RoryOF]

I can recollect a report and thread on Forum some months ago of repeated (hundreds) of insertions of the one image. John_Ha was active in that thread - I'll draw this thread to his attention.

[John_Ha]

This program is so unstable.

No it's not. You are finding it unstable but about 200,000,000 million users find it stable. You do need to do a little maths. Do you think the problem lies with the AOO software the other 199,999,999 people find is OK? Or do you think that, just possibly, the problem might lie with your understanding (or lack of understanding), your installation, your unique PC configuration,your way of working and/or with the files you are editing?

... I save every 10 seconds ...

Well, that looks like the problem doesn't it? It takes AOO a while to write all the file and the writing continues after the blue bar has crossed the screen so you are saving far too frequently.

Do the following:

1. Read See [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images for a discussion on how best to handle images in Writer.

Q1. What is your Graphics Memory set to?
Q2. What is your AutoSave time set to?
Q3. How are your images inserted - linked or embedded?
Q4. How big are your images? Unzip the .odt file and look inside the Pictures folder. What size are the files?
Q5. Did you paste JPG images into the file? If so they are saved as enormous PNG images.

Please upload a file showing the problem so that it can be analysed. Use a file share site, Dropbox or Google Drive. If the file has confidential material in it, you can obscure the contents without affecting the structure too much (lines will spill differently because different characters have different widths) by changing every alphabetic character to an " x ", and every digit to an " n " with

Edit: Make sure you switch off Edit > Changes ..., before doing this! It would be far better if we could see the original document.

Edit > Find and Replace
Tick Regular expressions (under More ...)
Find box [:alpha:]
Replace box x
click Replace all
and
Find box [:digit:]
Replace box n
click Replace all

To accept changes I simply use Edit > Change > Accept or Reject. It often crashes while reviewing edits.

Q6. Are you leaving Edit > Changes ... switched on? That is a sure way to guarantee the file will crash.
Q7. What file format are you saving as? Are you using .odt? Or are you using .doc?
Q8. What program is your reviewer using to make the changes to the file? Are they using AOO? or MS Word?

[John_Ha]

I can recollect a report and thread on Forum some months ago of repeated (hundreds) of insertions of the one image. John_Ha was active in that thread - I'll draw this thread to his attention.

Rory

If I remember correctly it was a file where Edit > Change ..., was being used and I think the corruption was being caused by the reviewer using MS Word. I'll try and dig it out.

Edit: See [Solved] Automatically created duplicate images. I don't think it has too much in common with this poster as he is not getting multiple images.

As for this poster, until we see a file we are just guessing ...

[RoryOF]

A reminder: in the first post, the OP mentions that /Edit /Changes is being used.

[John_Ha]

Rory

Yes. See my first post above. I'm happy to put money on this being a problem where MS Word has corrupted the file while applying Edit > Changes. Note what saphil says in the other thread:

I looked at the XML following your lead, and there definitely looks to be some loops in the indexing.
I am pretty sure the editor looked at, and commented the document in Word. This has happened before, but I wasn't looking a deadline in the face before, so I just created a new document. In this case, the basic chapter had been approved, and I was only working in the small rewrites requested. I really didn't want to recreate an entirely new document.
What I finally did was grab the XML in notepad++ and pull the actual text out of it, and created a clean copy on the publisher's template. Then I went in and added the images in proper order. In the original creation the images went into the document in a more random order, as the illustrative subsections were not written in the order found in the final document.
Thank you all for your help. I am leaning toward a Microsoft bug in docx or doc and their poor handling of odt.

[RoryOF]

I agree - as OO is a free download, I am surprised that so many edit files across applications - OO on one machine, MS Office on another. It makes more sense that the one application be used for all editing, and indeed, for final formatting, before production of a PDF, only the one application on the one computer.

[benlev@aol.com]

Thank you. I have updated my signature. I didn't even realize it was there. Appreciate the point to the settings to change it.

[benlev@aol.com]

I was the poster on the issue about "100's of figures". The advice that I got back then was to not simply paste figures into OO. Always save as PNG or similar and use the insert picture function. That seems to have helped a LOT. These other instabilities I assumed were from reusing the same document as a template over and over and carrying along some bug. So I retyped and reformatted the document a few weeks ago but it seems to be getting worse.

[RoryOF]

I'm thinking of a workaround:

Might it work to place the images as background (not full area background) on their pages, and then by careful use of Space Above/Below paragraphs arrange the text to not overwrite these pictures. I'm not certain that this will improve the situation, and it will require a distinct Page Style for each picture, but with only six or eight pictures that ought not be an insurmountable problem.

[John_Ha]

We are guessing until you either

a) answer the questions Q1 ... Q8 you were asked here, or, preferably,

b) you upload a file showing the problem.

[benlev@aol.com]

I will experiment with this. It does seem to be related to inserting images. I changed from "anchor as character" and "anchor to paragraph" to see if that helps as well. I have not looked at the background setting.

[John_Ha]

I take it therefore that you don't want any more help to find out what the problem is and to fix it as you refuse to answer the questions you are asked.

I will experiment with this.

Just carry on stumbling blindly - you might even get there ...

[tochabu]

I started having bad allocation errors again when trying to open a large oo writer file. I could open smaller ones OK. Earlier, I had a problem with bad allocation that was solved by applying a BIOS update for my computer. Suddenly, the bad allocation errors appeared again when opening the large file. I just uninstalled Windows Update KB4486553 (Cumulative Update for .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.7.2 for Windows 10 Version 1809 for x64), and I can now open and work with the large file again. Here is the earlier post about the BIOS update: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=95009&p=457223#p457223

[TopCat1951]

After editing a 67 page .odt document which includes several photographs, which I had no trouble converting to a .pdf document around 12 months ago, I now cannot convert my new document. Half way through I get the messages ‘Bad Allocation’ - Fatal Flaw. I have tried various work around but without success, including upgrading from OpenOffice 4.1.6 to 4.1.7, but no success. Following the crash I have to recover the closed programme and I don’t know where to go from here. I even attempted to convert to a .doc format but this comes up with the same message as when trying to pdf. From what I have seen online, other people have had the same issue. Any help please. I use Windows 10 latest versions.

[RoryOF]

You could install and try LibreOffice, which also handles .odt files.

[TopCat1951]

Great advice. I downloaded LibreOffice and after opening up my .odt document in LibreOffice, I was able to successfully convert into a .pdf document. Thank you very much.