An annoying and non-obvious error message

So this afternoon there I was, typing up a detailed design for a solution that I’ve been tasked with, and Word (don’t start!) tells me it can’t autosave my file.What?

Cannot save the file [filename], too many open files. Would you like to abort or retry?

That’s weird, I don’t recall seeing this problem before. I shut down firefox, Visio and GropeWise too, still no joy.I tried changing save locations … no good.I also started getting messages that Groupwise libraries are used by Word for document management integration and I’d better startup groupwise rightquick in order to save anything.WTF sort of idiot system is that? I certainly did not tell Word that I wanted it to faff around with GropeWise. Interact with it, yes … but not become so dependent upon it that it forgets how to save in its own format ffs!So I tried starting Gropewise again. Scary error message now:

Ordinal 75 was not found in library MAPI32.DLL

And of course, GropeWise failed to exec.You might, by now, be thinking that my blood pressure had not risen, and that I had not (yet) started to swear out loud.You would, if you thought that, be incredibly and sadly wrong.Fortunately this hadn’t f***ed-up firefox, so a quick google search found `the solution:`_

(fire up cmd.exe)
cd c:\windows\system32
cp mapi32.dll mapi32_broken.dll
cp mapi32_moz_bak.dll mapi32.dll

Amazingly, GropeWise then decided it would play ball… though just to be sure I created an RTF copy of my document and stashed it in a few other places before rebooting.