The budget includes an item which I have deleted from my bills/deposits

If you delete a recurring item from your bills and deposits area which is included in the budget, then sometimes strange things can occur. This is sometimes known as the 'phantom budget bug'.

The bill in question should be removed from the budget first to avoid this problem, but that's not particularly practical or intuitive. The problem is that you won't know that you need to have done that until too late!

If you're using Microsoft Money 2002, then this is referenced on Article 100. With this and recent verions of Money see this page: Microsoft KB article 318841.

The above fix doesn't remove the error from the file, it just hides it by changing the category. Microsoft Money 2006 still exhibits the same problem.