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Hi everyone,

I'm running 64-bit Windows 8.1 Pro, and sort of regretting having "upgraded" to it from Windows 7 Ultimate, but it hasn't been problematic enough for me to go to the bother of reinstalling Windows 7. One thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to revert a particular setting back to the default. When I installed this OS, I also installed the freeware AMD RAMDisk software, which, after using it for a few days, I remembered why I'd uninstalled it from Windows 7 before- it doesn't handle crashes very well. Now, I'd changed my temp directories from the normal ones to the R: drive (the RAMdrive), which, of course, now no longer exists since I've gotten rid of it. In environment variables, I changed TMP and TEMP back to C:\temp, but I still encounter a problem where the system acts as though there's not enough memory: when I open Excel 2013 (also 64-bit), the program itself opens fine, and I can open an existing spreadsheet and manipulate it, no problem. However, when I try to create a new blank workbook, I get this error:

Microsoft Excel cannot open or save any more documents because there is not enough available memory or disk space.

Now, certainly it's not a RAM issue because I have 24GB of RAM in this machine and am not using anywhere close to that just running Excel and nothing else, and SSD/hard disk storage is also nowhere close to full, so I suspect there's something in the OS still trying to point to the non-existent R: drive to use as a scratch/temp space to create this new spreadsheet. Does anybody know where this might be? I've looked everywhere I can think of. Thanks in advance!

Check other environment variables to see if they may be referencing R:

Also have a look on C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Local\Temp and make sure it's a real local directory, and not a "junction" that could still point into R:. Junctions are like symbolic links in Gnu/Linux, but MSFT tries to hide that fact from you.

Hey Mark, I had checked those already, but after checking Word to see if it behaved the same way as Excel, I found the problem. Word's error message was a little different, so I did a Google search on it, and found that Excel and Word both use whatever temporary Internet files location is set in Internet Explorer for their temporary files, and, as you might guess, I still had that set to the R: path. Changing that back to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files in the registry did the trick. Thanks!

Evan wrote:

and found that Excel and Word both use whatever temporary Internet files location is set in Internet Explorer for their temporary files

Good to know and glad you've fixed the problem. I never would have guessed that. This makes me think back to many years ago when MSFT was facing anti-trust and as part of their defense made a big stink that removing IE would break too many other things in Windoze. Though with all the Cloud stuff these days, this almost makes sense.