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Oh, the annoying errors from SharePoint!  At least this one didn’t say "please contact your help desk."

This error was experienced on a SharePoint site used for tracking project management tasks. 

There is a task list with a number of Lookup columns that was working perfectly fine for months.  Then, out of the blue, folks started experiencing this error, "The server was unable to save the form at this time.  Please try again."

A search of the web indicates that we are not alone experiencing this problem.  Some of the solutions point to a low memory issue, but our DEV server has 32GB of memory assigned to it, with only about 6-8GB being used, so it’s doubtful that’s the issue!

Some of the potential solutions:

1. Restart the "SharePoint Search Hosting Controller" service.
2. The Free Download Manager Explorer add-on causes an issue.
3. The Security Token Service needs to be recycled or has some other issue.
4. An IISRESET fixes the problem.
5. Enabling content types and adding "link to a document" content type fixes the issue for document libraries.

Until I got to the last potential solution I was having no luck.  Since this was not a document library, I couldn’t add the "link to a document" content type, but I certainly could try adding other content types.

I enabled content types on the list under Advanced Settings.

In the Content Types section, I went to add from existing content types.

From here I simply added the Item content type…one of the simplest system content types.

Voilà!  The edit can now be made to the item and saved successfully!

Now, I didn’t try every item in our list, but the one I was testing on had a file attachment.  Not sure if that has anything to do with the source of the issue, but I did capture a few SharePoint logs along the way.  Here are a couple of things I saw, but couldn’t find anything on the web that helped me much.  These messages seem to point to the RESX files in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\15\Resources folder and, as I looked inside core.resx and core.en-US.resx, I could not find any string "restricted" within the resource files.

This was seen right after the EditForm.aspx link to the item on which I was experimenting.

pm/Lists/Project%20Tracking%20Tasks/EditForm.aspx?ID=171

There was also a "UserAgent not available, file operations may not be optimized." following it, but I’ve learned to ignore these.