Computer shutdown

[lukeivers]

I'm a support person for a large department of a university. I'm
currently having one of the users I support experience a very odd
problem consistently that I am unable to find any kind of report on or
fix for, and am unable to fix myself.

The user is trying to open an excel file from a mapped drive off of our
local network. She clicks on the icon on the toolbar (although she can
get the same results via File | Open), and then proceeds to scroll
laterally through all the excel files on her mapped drive. At a random
point during said scrolling, the screen will go completely black,
keyboard and mouse input cease to have any effect, and the only thing
you can do is turn the computer completely off, then back on.

She is using Excel 2003 on Windows XP, the computer is a Dell Optiplex
270 with standard hardware for that model. The experience is
repeatable on her computer via any user account browsing any folder
containing the files from that drive (I tried copying them over to a
test folder on her local drive and performing the same operation, with
the same results as before), but is not repeatable on another computer
of the same type running the same program, browsing the same files.

I've tried un-installing and re-installing Office 2003, and
re-installed from a different installation source, and I have all
current Office updates installed on her PC.

 

[Harlan Grove]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...
....

The user is trying to open an excel file from a mapped drive off of our
local network. She clicks on the icon on the toolbar (although she can
get the same results via File | Open), and then proceeds to scroll
laterally through all the excel files on her mapped drive. At a random
point during said scrolling, the screen will go completely black,
keyboard and mouse input cease to have any effect, and the only thing
you can do is turn the computer completely off, then back on.

....

Unlikely this is specifically an Office or Excel problem. It could be a
hardware problem, e.g., flaky memory chips. Next thing to try would be
full hardware diagnostics, just to rule that out.

If that doesn't turn up anything, run Excel in safe mode (Start menu,
Run, enter excel /safe) and see if the problem still arises.