PowerPoint Freezes - Too many clicks?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dimka
  • Start date Start date
D

Dimka

Our office has about 8 Project Managers all of whom are advanced PPT users
(well over 5 years of daily experience). Since upgrading to 2007, PPT
reliability has been very poor. It isn't machine or template specific. It
also doesn't appear to be Vista related, as we attempted to use PPT2007 on a
machine running Windows 7 Beta.

THE PROBLEM: PPT freezes very frequently when you have too many clicks on
any given slide. As an example, if you edit a text box and click on a
shape/image too quickly, PPT freezes and is never able to recover. We run
into two to five occorances of this daily - across all employees.

PLEASE HELP! It's really hindering productivity...and we are a MS vendor
working on Microsoft deliverables.

If it helps for troubleshooting, here are additional details:

Description:
A problem caused this program to stop interacting with Windows.

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: AppHangB1
Application Name: POWERPNT.EXE
Application Version: 12.0.6500.5000
Application Timestamp: 49a68f9d
Hang Signature: 3de6
Hang Type: 16384
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.256.6
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Hang Signature 1: 7c1739ab3ed5f8eaeba3f8b84e5fe321
Additional Hang Signature 2: 76f6
Additional Hang Signature 3: 7810c2b312d66783ea609cc4b4177bb3
Additional Hang Signature 4: b41f
Additional Hang Signature 5: c4541c4293b5cccea36f3caeecf54046
Additional Hang Signature 6: 6bd8
Additional Hang Signature 7: 2386ee88d75adfec0ed2e93e65b92c35

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Lucy,

Thanks for the help. Followed the instructions and installed a local
printer. However, the problem still persists.

I am going to have others in my office give this is soloution a try - as we
are all connected to network printers...and nothing locally.

Does anyone else have a solution?
 
Hi Dimka,

Could you better define some loose variables. About how many clicks on the
slide (10, 50, 100, more)?

Are their any event traps loaded, including COM apps? What add-ins are
running?

How large is the PPT file? 1 MB, 100 MB, 2 GB? How much data is being
manipulated?

Is there any other software running on the machines that may be stealing
cycles or focus? Antivirus, Backups, VoIP?

This error has been reported across the entire Office suite (it seems) and
even some non-Office apps. The cause has been suggested to be from
Anti-virus programs, Firewall apps, Vista, and even VoIP programs.

Bill Dilworth
 
There are several variables here, as you can see by the number of answers
and suggestions - all are valid. I am going to side with Lucy's suggestion
about adjusting the video driver, or at least telling PowerPoint not to use
some of them.

With Vista a new set of video/graphics card specifications came into play
and PowerPoint is not really optimized to use them yet. I am making a few
assumptions:
- Computers are running Vista or Windows 7
- Computers are running PPT 2007
- Computers have a graphics card that has both dedicated and shared video
memory (it is that shared part that causes performance issues)

Try this:
- Open PPT 2007
- go to SLIDE SHOW tab
- Open SET UP SLIDE SHOW in the set up section
- Under PERFORMANCE be sure the USE HARDWARE GRAPHICS ACCELARATION is
unchecked
- Close PPT
- Open presentation and see if slideshow performance is improved


--
Troy
TLC Creative Services, Inc.
A MS powerPoint MVP
www.tlccreative.com
www.ThePowerPointBlog.com
 
Lucy,

Tried to follow the instructions, except that when in the Troubleshoot Tab,
the 'Change Setting' is grayed out. I am having my IT techs look into
whether or not this is a permissions issue.
 
Troy,

Working on some of the other mentioned solutions. However, just double
checked and the 'Use hardware graphics acceleration' was and is still turned
off.
 
I've been having this exact problem since getting PPT 2007 but this
hotfix from Microsoft seems to solve my issues:

'Description of the PowerPoint 2007 hotfix package
(Oart-x-none.msp, Oartconv-x-none.msp,
Powerpoint-x-none.msp): September 9, 2009'
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975021)

Sorry if someone else posted it somewhere, I didn't see it if they did.
Click to expand...

This fix seems to have worked for me. I was getting so frustrated
trying to put together a slide that kept freezing anything I started
to mess with the graphs. Thank you so much for this link!!!
 
Greetings!

We have several departments at work using PowerPoint 2007 each day. They
work with charts, graphics and so on.

When Office 2007 SP2 was released we installed it for all users (our version
is Pro Plus running in XP Pro SP3) and we didn't notice any immediate
problems. After a few weeks in several files we began having this problem:
whenever an user clicked on a chart, then tried to edit data in Excel it
would successfully do so until the point when he/she had to return back to
ppt editing (quiting Excel). At that point Powerpoint would crash and the
classic window restart application would appear.

We subsequently managed to 'stumble' upon KB975021, and, like some of you,
installed it and fixed the problem (only on those PCs where we had this
specific problem, as Microsoft explains in the KB description).

However, yesterday, one user showed us a strange behavior with another
powerpoint file. Powerpoint crashes at opening [it even shows the preview on
the left for the two first slides then it crashes and prompts another
restart].

We have been able to reproduce the problem on another PC by installing the
above hotfix. When uninstalling the HotFix from Add/Remove Programs (btw,
there were 3 entries for this hotfix!) all is fine, the file opens fine, but
I am at a loss to what has this file so 'special' that PPT crashes with the
hotfix installed.

So... we removed some strings of hair and did/tried also to do what all of
you have recommended. (The only thing not is the reinstall full
office/uninstall sp2 as I'm not convinced that the lack of sp2 wouldn't
impact outlook).

We haven't been able to find a solution yet (i would have tried installing
powerpoint sp1 over existing installation but i cannot find it as a
standalone download, nor am I able to extract it from SP1 Office Download
Kit).

I will however keep you posted if I find a fix. For me and my colleagues we
cannot live without the fix, but we somehow can't live with it.
 
Please do keep us posted. As you've probably read, the hotfix does cause
crashing issues for some users -- seems to be when multiple files are
opened? -- but nobody here has any idea why that happens or what the fix for
the hotfix is!

I'd urge you to report it to Microsoft via their support channels so they
have a record of it.
 
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