There is not enough free memory to load the entire file

Web, another possibility -- there's a setting in FM to turn off display of graphics (could be in preferences, could be buried in maker.ini, I forget where just now). Anyhow, maybe that would help conserve resources enough to let the doc load.

I am going through a disk defrag right now. The number of unmovable green bits doesn't look too high so I am using the regular disk defragger.

I tried the "System Managed Size" for paging and that didn't help.

I am leaning toward it being a corrupt file (a bad file size in the header maybe?) and taking the hit.

Funny that after all this time, FM is still the only good document engineering tool out there and even with this setback, I don't think I would even consider using anything else. Other people look at us as an odd bunch, but they just do not understand :)

Thanks for the help.

AFAIK, Microsoft recommends that, for WinXP, you should always set that page file size dialog to "System managed size"
(Setting a static page file size was sometimes helpful in Win9x, but not for WinXP.) XP should be able to dynamically resize the pagefile to make it as big as required to open anything...

Another useful utility is www.sysinternals.com (now brought back into the Microsoft fold) "PageDefragment", which can defrag the green bits on your hard drive that Disk Defragmenter can't reach ;-)

Web...

Here is a smattering of ideas.

Do you have ample unused HDD space? If not, defrag it, although in myu experience, this hardly makes a difference. Check your TEMP/TMP folders and clean them out. Consider downloading cCleaner and running it. Do everything you can to make ample room on your HDD and in places like your TEMP folders. If your HDD is congested, temporarily remove big but relatively unimportant applications and move data elsewhere for a while.

Even with 4GB of RAM, Frame can only use somewhere between 2.7 - 3.2 GB of it under the very best of conditions, and that includes the application as well as the files. Unpacking image files can consume considerably more space than it takes to store them. For example, a 1024 x 768 color image requires more than 3.1MB to describe it as a 32-bit color image, yet when stored in JPEG format, it can be as small as 50kB, a compression of 65:1. Of course, it's not reasonable to assume that your document is comprised entirely of such highly-compressed images, but in the unachievable extreme, it would take 980MB to simultaneously open 15MB worth of those kind of files. The point here is to not fall into the trap of thinking a 15MB file comprising a lot of images needs little more than 15MB of RAM.

Make sure ALL other applications are closed when trying to open your file...Outlook, IE or FireFox, Anti-Virus and Spyware apps, Word, etc.

Consider sending a copy of the file to someone else to see if they can open it for you and delete some of the images before resaving it. If you have a backup copy, rename your current file and restore the backup. Maybe your working copy is corrupt. Who knows? Anything is probably worth trying as long as you have a save copy stored somewhere.

Dennis...

Dennis,
Exactly the same configuration, give or take, as in the older post on this topic:
Michael Kitzmiller, "There is not enough free memory to load the entire file" #, 27 Jul 2007 5:23 am
That one had the same size of document as mine, which was under the RAM available.

My XP page file setting has 3 options: custom set to 1532 MB, system managed size, and a no paging file option. I used the first option, but moving this up to double doesn't help. The maximum is 4096 MB it appears.

Strange that FM knows right away upon starting the load that the file is too big. Almost as if there is some bad magic in the header that it uses to allocate or reserve memory with.

Also it looks like FM hits a peak memory usage during initial file load that is 6x of steady state usage. I have another file that I can load that is 10% smaller than the one that doesn't load, but this one hits the same peak usage. The peak usage happens right away and is the same for both files. This looks like a reserved memory that only gets used on commit.

It would be interesting to know if these limitations are from a design that is carried forward from old versions of FM, back when memory was more a premium. I last used FM to write a book more than 10 years ago, and made the mistake this time in trying to aggregate too much content into one file before splitting into the book/multiple document arrangement. I definitely won't make that mistake again.

Web...

It might help you if you told them what OS and FM Version you're working with, and how much RAM, free HDD space and paging file allocation you have available.

Dennis...