Not enough memory to save file.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone - I think I found the answer. And it does not make me happy. (There were no stray guide points.) I had used the Symbol Sprayer tool spraying LOTS of symbols - think leaves for a tree. And I think it was trying to save each one of those leaves to a layer in Photoshop. When I rasterized the layers with leaves, it saved pronto - no problem. In the past, with similar situations, I had expanded the Sprayed Symbols and ended up with each symbol on it's own layer in PS.

On like note, I also had a scatter brush in there that I did not expand that when exported gave me separate layers in PS for each of the items the scatter brush . . . um, scattered.

I'm not sure, and have not experimented, but I think having Maximum Editability selected in the Export dialog box for PSD may be the culprit. Any thoughts on that?

Other notes/answers to responses: No partitioning, about 170 gigs of free space, I do have a lot of files transferrrd from my old mac, did trash the preferences.

again, thanks.

@MB of RAM would be ok with Illustrator but four would be better.

How do you have your hard drive set up is it partitioned? Even though it is new do you have a lot of files that have been transferred to the new iMac?

How much space do you have on the scratch disk, whether it is the startup disk or a partition?

It does however sound like you have a very large fie caused by the situation Gary describe.

As for you second part of the question I would say the operation of trying to export the file as a .psd of a large though unintentional file has flooded the cache and the problem will go away as soon as you delete the end points. But I would before relaunching Illustrator, trash the Adobe Illustrator Settings Folder in your user's preferences.

Zoom all the way out and select all (command-a) and see if your bounding box is way out there. That would show you if there are some stray points out there.
There is a limit to the .psd file size that you might be hitting.

Which version of Illustrator are you using?

how much RAM do you have on your machine?

I don't know about the second part of your question - that does sound screwy. But for the first part it sounds like you might have partially deleted a guide, and it's two endpoints are at the edges of the pasteboard, trying to create an enormous raster image. This shouldn't be the case if you're confining your artwork to a single artboard, though - the artboard should ignore anything not within it.

I, for one, would appreciate it if when you delete a single-segment guide - even if only partly direct-selected - it deleted the whole guide, endpoints and segment.

IN addition to the above, after I get that message, if I try an just save that file Illustrator 'quit responding' and then I can't even force quit it. When I force quit, the program quits, but the icon in the program chooser doesn't go away, and in the FOrce Quit App, it remains as well as (not responding) even though the program has quit. And of course I can't restart the app. And I can't restart my mac. I have to force quit my mac with the power button. This is all very screwy.