***This is fixed in ClarisWorks 4.0v5 Macintosh.***
An updater for all previous versions of 4.0 is available online.
If you have 48 MB or more of free memory (RAM) on your computer when ClarisWorks 4.0 launches, it will usually crash when trying to close a file. In some cases, the issue only occurs in documents of certain types, or only in documents containing headers. This is true for all Macintosh and compatible model machines, including Power-PC and 680x0 microprocessor-based CPUs. The amount of free memory may be the result of either physical RAM, virtual memory (including such utilities as RAM Doubler), or both.
The ClarisWorks engineering team is aware of this issue. At the current time, the only solution is to configure your system so that there is less than 48 MB of free RAM when ClarisWorks starts up. This can be accomplished by launching other programs prior to starting ClarisWorks (and increasing the memory allocation of these programs if necessary). You can quit these other applications once ClarisWorks is running, but will have to relaunch them prior to any relaunch of ClarisWorks.
The following examples show what you might do to avoid this issue.
Example 1
Computer with 24 MB of RAM, running RAM Doubler to 48 MB.
In this case, the issue will not occur. The system software will be using memory, so the amount of free memory will be less than 48 MB.
Example 2
Computer with 56 megabytes (MB) of real or virtual memory. System software is using 6 MB of RAM. Thus, the free memory is 50 MB. Set a program like SimpleText to a Preferred memory size of more than 2 MB. Place an alias to SimpleText in your Startup Items folder inside your System Folder. After starting your computer, there will be less than 48 MB of memory available. Launch ClarisWorks. You can then quit SimpleText.
An alternate solution may be to create a RAM disk on your system to take up the free RAM.