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More on AppleWorks stalling
Continuing our coverage of AppleWorks stall/slow-down issues - specifically where typing in AppleWorks is extremely slow - it now appears that the Auto-Save feature may be the culprit in some cases.
User FAQs are available in the Apple Discussions forum explaining the issue as well as providing tips and AppleScripts to help manage the recent items aliases.
Dale Gillard has a shareware application to deal with the issue "Among other things my shareware application, Sidekick, displays and manages recent item aliases correctly."
The primary issue is that aliases that are used to implement the Recent Items feature (which are located in ~/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/Starting Points/Recent Items) are never deleted and just continue to accumulate.
Gillard writes "Eventually AppleWorks is unable to cope with managing so many recent item aliases that everyday actions like typing are slowed. The Recent Items feature in AppleWorks doesn't show the last 10 documents used. It *alphabetically* lists the first 10 aliases in your Recent Items folder, and not the 10 most recently used aliases.
"The fix is to switch off the feature you can also delete the contents of the Recent Items folder, but I haven't checked to see what happens when the recent items gets back up to 10 again Turning off the feature doesn't stop the recent item aliases from accumulating. Rather, it improves AppleWorks performance because it ignores the still accumulating aliases in the Recent Items folder.
"Please also note that accumulated files in the AutoSave folder also cause the noted 'slow typing' behavior. The symptoms, cause and solution for this issue is also to either turn off the feature (though it is handy to have) or to regularly delete the contents of this folder too. The AutoSave folder can be found at ~/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/AutoSave."
These issues are present in both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 versions of AppleWorks.
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