swatch palette becomes full of unused colors when copy and paste from one document to another!!

[Kim_Co...@adobeforums.com]

sometimes (i haven't found a pattern yet of when) when i copy and paste an object that is solid black (for example) into another Illustrator document, a bunch of unused swatches copy into the swatch palette for no reason! lots of "default global colors" and PMS swatches. i then have to 'select all unused' and delete them all to clean out the palette (which always seems to stall while thinking when selecting or deleting them). often times i get the global swatch warning (always 2x, not just once) before placing an object and before the whole swatch palette fills up with unused colors.

this has only happened recently in the last few months and i have been using Illustrator for years so i'm not sure what's stemming this. a new update? has anyone else noticed this problem and know a solution? is there a preference checked somewhere that i don't know about?

guess i should mention i'm on CS3 Illustrator running MAC OS 10.5.6

thanks,
kim

[Larry G. Schneider]

Just an aside. There is an Action in the Default Actions set which does the delete job in a second for all four panels (Swatches, Brushes, Graphic Styles and Symbols). You can assign an F-key to it and just hit that. I use F-1.

[Jeff_...@adobeforums.com]

I've had this problem before as well and it has to do with a currupt file that your coppying from. It's too complicated to explain here so here is my fix for it.
I take the file and save it down or up in CS1. Open infected file in CS1. Create a new file in CS1 the same size as the one you've opened. Select all and drag and drop into the new empty file. Don't copy paste, it must be dragged into the file. You can then delete all global colours and save your file. The curruption will be gone. There's a way to check suspect files to see if they have the deleted global colours present. Open your suspect file in a text editor like simple text, scroll down a little way and if you see a bunch of lines of code mentioning "deleted global colours" then you know it's infected and has to be fixed.
Hope this helps

Here is another idea from a bit of research I just did. Don't know if this works or not but you might want to give it a try and it explains the issue in more detail
<http://adobe.groupbrowser.com/t177412.html>

[Kim_Co...@adobeforums.com]

thanks for the suggestions. problem is this happens to me in MULTIPLE files. it all started when i opened ONE file from an outside designer and from there copy and pasted one basic shape that was 1 color into multiple files. from there the problem has been following me since. seems like a big virus. once the element is in a file anything i copy from that file to another carries the corruption. so now i probably have 200 files with it.

also i don't have CS1 anymore. only CS2. and the problem with opening up files in lower versions is that it won't read the CS3-only features. so it makes me nervous to go backwards then forwards again. might lose some design elements. but i can see why doing that would "clear" the swatch palette...

[Kim_Co...@adobeforums.com]

oh and Larry thanks for the suggestion on the action. i tried that and it doesn't save any time. when there's a glitch like this, it still pauses for way too long when deleting the unused swatches