slide show not letting me change slides!

[Carl Sommer]

I must be going insane...

I have some pretty simple PowerPoint presentations.
I've had no trouble presenting them before. Page Up and
Page Down keys work great for moving between slides,
as does Enter and Backspace.

And in a pinch, right mouse button and selecting Next or Previous.

However, for some reason today, almost nothing works. And I
haven't changed anything (honest!)

I'm running Office XP (PowerPoint 2002 10.6501.6626) SP3.
When I try to run any of these presentations (or even create a new one)
I can't get the slide transitions to happen. But when I escape out, I'm
at the slide I should have been on in the presentation. this is using the
slide show setup "Presented by a speaker (full screen).". Additionally,
if I try to use the right mouse button during the presentation in order
to select Next or Previous, the area where the popup menu appeared
is not refreshed, and remains black once the popup is gone. And sometimes
the slide show hangs just in coming up.

If I change the show setup to Browsed by an individual (window) the
navigation keys for the slide show seem to work as they are supposed to.

This is on a 1.1 gigahertz Pentium III laptop with 512mb of RAM and
plenty of free disk space.

I am totally at a loss for what to do. And even with this problem resolved,
I still might be going nuts.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Carl

 

[Bill Dilworth]

Sounds like the pop-ups are taking the focus from the PowerPoint
presentation and pausing the show. To confirm this, when it happens next,
hit the Windows key and click on the PowerPoint task on the left. If the
resume toolbar is showing, then the presentation is paused. PowerPoint is
CPU intensive and needs the processors full attention to run correctly, so
pauses the show when something else takes the focus.

The best cure would be to eliminate whatever is causing the pop-ups during
the show. If they are desired, then see about disabling them while the show
is running. If they are not desired, then clean your system with virus,
spyware, and adware elimination tools.

If getting rid of them is not possible, and re-doing your hard drive is not
prudent, then perhaps the PowerShow add-in may help. It allows PowerPoint
presentations not to have the full attention of the computer.
http://officeone.mvps.org/powershow/powershow.html

--
Bill Dilworth, Microsoft PPT MVP
===============
Please spend a few minutes checking vestprog2@
out www.pptfaq.com This link will yahoo.
answer most of our questions, before com
you think to ask them.

Change org to com to defuse anti-spam,
ant-virus, anti-nuisance misdirection.
..
..

 

[Carl Sommer]

Thanks for the response. But I'm still a bit confused:

- I've run a current virus scan, adware, and spybot search.
The system appears clean.

- I've checked using Task Manager - when this occurs I'm
only running about 9% of the CPU.

- If I'm not trying to use the right mouse menu button, what
about my regular Forward and Backward keys, or mouse
clicks. They are getting ignored too. Granted it sounds
like a CPU starvation situation.

I am disk - imaged, so I could re-stage somewhat easily.
I've been burned bad in the past, so I have started imaging
my system on a regular basis. I'm equally as likely to uninstall
and reinstall Office too. Neither of which is an immediate fix...

Thanks,

Carl

 

[Brian Reilly, MS MVP]

Try turning down the hardware acceleration setting in Control Panel,
Display, Settings, Advanced, TroubleShoot.

I used to have a similar problem of screen refresh in Edit mode and
just check my settings and they are turned back about 4 clicks. Try
turning them all the way back and if that works, start bring it back
up one by one till you see the problem again.

Brian Reilly, PowerPoint MVP

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Carl, this may sound silly, but have you tried shutting down the computer (a
complete power-down), leaving it off for ten minutes or so, then starting up
again?



--
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================
Featured Presenter, PowerPoint Live 2004
October 10-13, San Diego, CA www.PowerPointLive.com
================================================

 

[Carl Sommer]

Yep. No luck.

I even uninstalled Office, and installed PowerPoint Viewer.
The Viewer worked just fine, like I would have expected Powerpoint
itself to work.

I then re-installed Office and tried it again. Same problem is still
there.

I imaged my hard disk 3 weeks ago, and everything worked then.
I may do a system restore and see how it goes. What a pain.

 

[Carl Sommer]

Brian - you're a genius. But I'm very confused - this used to
work fine with hardware acceleration fully cranked up. I had
to back it all away down to the mid-way setting. This is labeled

"Disable all DirectDraw and Direct3D accelerations, as well as all
cursor and advanced drawing functions. Use this setting to
correct severe problems with DirectX accelerated applications"

Sounds ominous and worrisome, especially since it used to work!

Thanks,

Carl

 

[Brian Reilly, MS MVP]

Carl,
Ignore my good friend -Steve who knows not what he speeks of. He lives
in a very safe world and doesn't mess us his machines like you and I
do. Just remember this, actually it's your own quote:

Brian - you're a genius.

(vbg). Glad you got it going again.
Brian Reilly, PowerPoint MVP

 

[Echo S]

Try turning down the hardware acceleration

woohoo! That's exactly what I was going to suggest (albeit a bit late!).
Does that surprise you?

 

[Echo S]

It could be that you've updated Direct X or something and it's not agreeing
with your video card drivers.

FWIW, changing hardware acceleration settings (sometimes down, sometimes up)
seems to solve a bazillion different odd display problems, so you're
definitely not alone. I wouldn't worry about it, to be honest.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Good thing you've got an image to work with. Has anything, particularly
drivers/DirectX/video-related stuff changed since you took the image? That'd
be the obvious candidate for fingerpointing.

For that matter, have you changed the hardware accel. setting in PPT itself?
(Slide Show, Set Up Show ..., down at the bottom of the dialog)

Ignore that Brian-looking man behind the curtain. He's too busy reformatting
his hard drive to give your problem the attention it deserves. Kinda neat,
though, the way he can make his computer spit flames like that.


--
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================
Featured Presenter, PowerPoint Live 2004
October 10-13, San Diego, CA www.PowerPointLive.com
================================================