XL2000: "Out of Virtual Memory" When You Open and Close Many Workbooks with Controls

• Microsoft Excel 2000

SYMPTOMS

When you open and close a large number of workbooks, available virtual memory decreases and you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

• A slowdown in computer performance



• "Out of Virtual Memory" messages



• Microsoft Excel may stop responding (hang)

CAUSE

These problems occur when the following conditions are true:

• You open and close one or more workbooks a large number of times.
  
  -and-



• The workbooks contain one or more ActiveX or OCX controls.
  
  -and-



• You do not restart Excel.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

MORE INFORMATION

When you open a workbook that contains an ActiveX/OCX control, the Excel process acquires a minimum of 20 private bytes of memory. Excel does not release this memory when it closes a workbook, but only releases it when Excel quits. The amount of the private memory leak can be greater, depending on which ActiveX/OCX control(s) you use in a workbook.

You can observe this behavior within Microsoft Windows NT Performance Monitor, Windows System Information tool, or another similar tool that measures available virtual memory.

The amount of time before errors occur depends on the amount of memory available and the amount of memory that the controls on each workbook use.

Additional query words: XL2000 hang hangs hanging hung lock up locks locking locked lockup freeze freezes freezing froze frozen stop stopping stopped won't respond waiting

Keywords : kbdta
Version : WINDOWS:2000
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbbug