Strange "Excel cannot complete this task with available resources" behaviour

I am working on a large Excel 2003 workbook A (around 115MB) on a Vista 64 machine with plenty of RAM (50GB or so...).
Starting from a fresh boot and not opening any other applications, I am trying to copy a large table of random numbers that lives on workbook B into a new sheet(tab) of workbook A.

I have tried various methods (copy paste by text, DDE [don't ask], manual, programatic) and have even tried to break the task into smaller and smaller chunks in between which I clear the clipboard using user32 calls EmptyClipboard and CloseClipboard as per http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/For...b-276864d7c28d

However the problem is bizarly always the same, at around the 62,000th row I get the "Excel cannot complete this task with available resources" error message.
However I can happily continue to copy and paste data so long as it isn't south of row 62,000 or thereabouts, which points to the problem being something other than memory resource exhaustion (Additionally I have been running 350MB sheets on this machine for years without a problem so a simple out of memory diagnosis doesn't quite fit)

Any ideas as to what this may be and how to resolve it?

Excel 2003 only allows so many rows (65535) and columns (256). Follow the link below for all the specifics.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ex...005199291.aspx

Any ideas?

Originally Posted by TheKid

I am working on a large Excel 2003 workbook A (around 115MB) on a Vista 64 machine with plenty of RAM (50GB or so...).
Starting from a fresh boot and not opening any other applications, I am trying to copy a large table of random numbers that lives on workbook B into a new sheet(tab) of workbook A.

I have tried various methods (copy paste by text, DDE [don't ask], manual, programatic) and have even tried to break the task into smaller and smaller chunks in between which I clear the clipboard using user32 calls EmptyClipboard and CloseClipboard as per http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/For...b-276864d7c28d

However the problem is bizarly always the same, at around the 62,000th row I get the "Excel cannot complete this task with available resources" error message.
However I can happily continue to copy and paste data so long as it isn't south of row 62,000 or thereabouts, which points to the problem being something other than memory resource exhaustion (Additionally I have been running 350MB sheets on this machine for years without a problem so a simple out of memory diagnosis doesn't quite fit)

Any ideas as to what this may be and how to resolve it?

50GB of RAM?

That's right, plenty ...

Yes, I think the actual line where it stops cooperating is 62,235 or something like that

Nothing?

Ok I bit the bullet and over the weekend rewrote all the precalculated table loading routines to read from csv files.
I guess some Excel problems aren't meant to be solved...