Troubleshooting issues with Excel

[TimmyMur]

I couldn't find Excel Troubleshooting section thus decided to post my
question in Excel section. Currently couple of my power users who use Office
2007 Enterprise Edition w/SP1 applied and all the patches started experience
problems with Excel. Both will work with Excel in normal fashion and than,
after few hours of work all of the sudden program has a screen redraw style
issue. Menu options disappear and so on. So the excel window remain open
but where the tool bar options are there is just blue space. When you close
excel the menu that opens to ask you to save your program also does not
display properly. You can work out where the button is roughly and press the
save button. Than user presented with prompt that file couldn't be saved as
there are no resources available. And these are new Intel Core 2 PCs from
Dell with 2GB of RAM. I did my research and found that I'm not alone -

http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-3313471.php
http://www.decisionmodels.com/memlimitsc.ht
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Sof...ml?sfQueryTermInfo=1+"out+resourc"+2007+excel

these just few of the links I found where folks referring to basically same
problem I have. And worse part is - no one yet to figure out why this is
happening. Anyone here might have an answer?

 

[Ron Rosenfeld]

I couldn't find Excel Troubleshooting section thus decided to post my
question in Excel section. Currently couple of my power users who use Office
2007 Enterprise Edition w/SP1 applied and all the patches started experience
problems with Excel. Both will work with Excel in normal fashion and than,
after few hours of work all of the sudden program has a screen redraw style
issue. Menu options disappear and so on. So the excel window remain open
but where the tool bar options are there is just blue space. When you close
excel the menu that opens to ask you to save your program also does not
display properly. You can work out where the button is roughly and press the
save button. Than user presented with prompt that file couldn't be saved as
there are no resources available. And these are new Intel Core 2 PCs from
Dell with 2GB of RAM. I did my research and found that I'm not alone -

http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-3313471.php
http://www.decisionmodels.com/memlimitsc.htm
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Sof...ml?sfQueryTermInfo=1+"out+resourc"+2007+excel

these just few of the links I found where folks referring to basically same
problem I have. And worse part is - no one yet to figure out why this is
happening. Anyone here might have an answer?

Please post back if you discover a solution.
--ron

 

[Harlan Grove]

I couldn't find Excel Troubleshooting section thus decided to post
my question in Excel section. Currently couple of my power users
who use Office 2007 Enterprise Edition w/SP1 applied and all the
patches started experience problems with Excel. Both will work with
Excel in normal fashion and than, after few hours of work all of
the sudden program has a screen redraw style issue.  Menu options
disappear and so on.  So the excel window remain open but where the
tool bar options are there is just blue space. . . .

Office 2007 includes Excel 2007, which uses the bloody wonderful
ribbon. There are no menus or toolbars. Do you mean items in the
bloody wonderful ribbon disappear?

. . . When you close excel the menu that opens to ask you to save
your program also does not display properly. . . .
Details?

. . . You can work out where the button is roughly and press the
save button. Than user presented with prompt that file couldn't be
saved as there are no resources available. And these are new Intel
Core 2 PCs from Dell with 2GB of RAM. I did my research and found
that I'm not alone -

...

What other software is running on these users' machines when these
problems occur? It's possible it's a resource issue, and there may be
some service or application with a memory bug that slowly but surely
consuming ever more memory even if it's not the foreground task. Have
these users run Task Manager just after this problem occurs and check
system resources.

Also, video may be a problem. Even though these are new machines,
check for newer video and printer drivers.

 

[Ron Rosenfeld]

What other software is running on these users' machines when these
problems occur? It's possible it's a resource issue, and there may be
some service or application with a memory bug that slowly but surely
consuming ever more memory even if it's not the foreground task. Have
these users run Task Manager just after this problem occurs and check
system resources.

Also, video may be a problem. Even though these are new machines,
check for newer video and printer drivers.

I suspect you are correct about the video. Although I've got the latest
drivers, and also made some minor changes in certain settings suggested by
others, the problem persists, although it seems less frequent.

The problem will also occur when booting into a mode where msconfig has been
used to disable everything except Microsoft services. So I do not think it is
an interfering, non-office program.

It occurs after some variable period of time. On this machine, it will occur
more quickly with the program open but blank, than with a worksheet present.
Some of the characteristics are that the ribbon may be missing or "fractured",
the menu bar may or may not be present. Different components may be drawn in
different places on the screen. Occasionally there will be a message about
insufficient resource to perform the operation (and that message box will be
incompletely displayed). On the task bar, right-clicking the program icon
brings up a box filled with black (my normal is white). As I move the cursor
within that small box, the different lines (maximize, restore, close, etc)
appear in "reversed print" (i.e. white on black).

There are some who think a common denominator is dual monitors. I'm not
convinced but my machine here is a dual monitor machine. At another home, I
have Excel 2007 on a single monitor machine, but I've not used that long enough
to definitely state whether this video disruption is a problem there, too.

Both of my video cards are NVidia based. Both of my CPU's are Intel.

If the problem does not occur on my other machine, it may lend some credence to
the dual monitor being an issue. But it'll be six months or so before I'll be
able to test that hypothesis.

Machine with dual monitors:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe 2.66GHz
EVGA 256-P2-N554-AX GeForce 7600GT 256MB

Machine with the single monitor:

Intel Pentium D 950 Presler 3.4GHz (also a dual core)
EVGA 512-P2-N570-AX GeForce 7900GTX 512MB

Both machines have Intel Motherboards, 2GB RAM, Windows XP SP2; and both the
motherboards and video cards are at the default settings except for one bios
tweak on this dual monitor machine (increasing PCI Latency to 128) that seemed
to decrease the frequency of this corruption.

Any other thoughts, Harlan?
--ron