Bloated files - found - a painful improvised solution

Having followed several items in the forum concerning project files sizes bloating (within Captivate 4) I've tried a few experiments and the results may be helpful to others.

Test 1): A file of one slide (yes, one) that had magically grown from a few kilobytes to 55Mb - the slide was the review slide that is automatically built in by Captivate if you select the review option in a quiz. The only change I had made to the (native) slide was to put a small white rectangle onto the slide. So why 55Mb? My only clue was that I had extracted it from a slide set of 200 slides (yes, big) that had an all up size of 175Mb.

So I created a one slide set (blank slide) of the same screen resolution and imported the review page.

I saved the project under a new name.

Rushed to the file directory and the new file size? 377Kb. A cool reduction of 54.5Mb!

Test 2😞 A file of 20 slides containing video and audio. Carefully purged of unused library items. File size 82Mb.

Repeated the process as per test 1.

New file size? 3.5Mb - and this is reasonable considering that it has an audio stream.

Captivate 4 clearly has a problem that needs urgent attention, this is the worst case of bloating I have ever come across. It's as if the entire history of the project is being added into the project (library?) on every single project change thus topsy gets bigger and bigger.

Remedy whilst Adobe gets its act together and fixes the product, tentatively, seems to be:

Divide up the bloated project into 20 slide sets (assuming a large project) - I've learnt the hard way that it has problems importing slides/objects from anything bigger (crashes routinely where slide set is more than 25 slides).

Then create a one slide project (same dimensions etc.) and import the 20 slide sections into the one slide project a few slides at a time, I bring in the first five, then the second, then the third etc. until all the 20 are imported.

Next save the new project under a new name. Call this S1

Repeat until all the twenty slide sets have been imported into their new projects. S1, S2, S3 ...

Now create a final new one slide project. Call this P1.

Import the sets S1, S2, S3 ... etc into P1 - they will now import (because their size has shrunk).

Finally save P1 under a new name say, P1Complete.

Completed project has shrunk about 80% in size and is manageable even though it has many slides.

Huge apologies if this has been covered before but I couldn't quickly find an answer to Captivate 4 bloating across the threads, and it was impacting a very important project here.

Regards,

Henry