error 53 not enough storage

Computer troubleshooting usually involves time and patience when you get such errors as in the title of this article. Yesterday, on a PC with Windows XP SP3, a client received the following error while working in a Sharepoint website:

Error 53, not enough storage to complete the command.

While troubleshooting this error across multiple IT forums, I found the following suggestions that did NOT work:

1) Problem is due to not enough RAM (not true, PC has 2GB of RAM which rarely goes past 1GB during daily use)

2) Move the paging file to another hard drive. (Did not try this because it sounds stupid for the above error message)

3) Try upgrading Internet Explorer to IE7 or IE8. (I did this, but it did not solve the issue.

4) The last thing recommended was to remove .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 which also did not help.

I said all of the above to help the next person having the same error 53 message....I am 99% certain that the ONLY issue is that the person's Windows profile became corrupt. Usually, when this happens, you can not un-corrupt the profile.

To fix it, create a new profile and move the data back from the old to the new profile.

That's it, simple as that. I came across this solution because I decided to logon to the PC myself and I tried exactly what the client was doing at the time and I did not get the error 53 message. I then renamed his windows profile and had him logon like he was a new user and just like that, the error was gone.

Moral of the story....when weird stuff happens like this, just try making a new Windows profile first or logon to the PC as another user to see if the same errors still happen with that profile. If they do, then something else is wrong, but if not, its safe to say the Windows profile became corrupt.
Has something like this happened to you recently?