File got HUGE and HUGE-ER - Design Center to Blame?

My drawing file has grown HUGE!

I am working with a file that has three external references, several Layer States, and 35+ Layout tabs.
After Submittal, some details changed, so I did a "Save As", to revise details and Layouts, but not lose the previous details.
At this point, the file was around 5MB in size.

Then, I started mucking around with the Design Center, to have an old version of a layout in the new file, or some such nonsense.
The file has steadily grown from 5 to 8 to 15 to 27 to 44 and now to 54 MB in size.

I even started a new file, and started pulling in Layouts from ADC. That file quickly grew to 138MB, with only 10 Layouts, and nothing in modelspace at all. Forget that file. Each Layout brought in seemed to be trying to bring in the xref's as well, but there are none in there. (I draw in modelspace, and dimension and annotate in each Layout's paperspace.)

I have purged the ex ref's, deleted unused image files, detached and re-attached the xref's, saved, purged again; everything I can think of, but I cannot get the file back to a manageable size.

Now the program keeps crashing - "Out Of Memory" or nothing at all, just GONE. Saving every two minutes eats up 20-30 seconds just for that!

Before you get too technical, I'm running full ACAD 2004, with 3.5G of RAM, NVIDIA Quatro NVS 285 Display (?).
The file is mostly 2D, with a small bit of 3D on one Layout.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get the file back to its original size?

I was going to suggest purge, but I see you did that. Did you purge regapps too in all of the files (xrefs etc)?

Do you have any object enablers installed?

We ran into an issue a while back with a block that didn't actually exist in the drawing. It was there, but you could never find it. For some reason, every time you saved the drawing every instance of that block would replicate itself and increase the file size. I'm wondering if you're running into something like that.
If it wasn't for all the set up you've done on the viewports, I'd suggest you save a copy, and -wblock the whole drawing and see what happens.
Regapps can cause the file size to increase, but I'd be surprised if it would jump that much.

Question: ". . . Object enablers . . ?"
Answer: Stuck with Acad 2004, need I say more?

Answer: "Regapps can cause . . ."
Question: What is a Regapp? I think we need to loop back to Question #1.

I did try some of the threads that came up in the "Similar Threads" stuff down below, but to no avail.......
With all the crashing, it took all day to do some small modifications and print all 39 tabs to pdf.
Glad to be out of it. For a while.

I may save off four ten-tab drawing files, and see what that does. Maybe it will isolate a bad Layout.

Regapp = Registered Application. Things like Eagle Point and other 3rd party add-on's use.
You can remove them by using the purge command from the command line.
-purge, select "R" for reg-apps and that should take care of that.
You'll need to do this for all the x-ref's prior to opening the other files that contain them.

You could always run a lisp routine on your drawings that will purge the heck out of your drawings.
This one sets to layer zero, zooms to .9 extents, purges everything three times and saves the drawing.

Code:

---

;;;A better purge command---------------------------------------------------------------
(defun c:mypurge ()
(setq ce (getvar "cmdecho"))
    (setvar "cmdecho" 0)
        (command "layer" "s" "0" "")
        (command "zoom"  "e"  "zoom"  ".9x" )
        (repeat 3
        (command "._purge" "_A" "*" "_N")
        (command "purge" "regapps" "" "n"))
  (setvar "cmdecho" ce)
(command "_qsave")
(princ)
)

---

Hope this helps! (I use it all the time).