Excel 2003 behaving strangely

[pinkshiro]

Hi there,

I'm trying to fix excel on a friends computer. When she opens excel,
everything is fine for approx 2-5 seconds, then all hell breaks loose!
We cannot enter data, open any menus, use the scroll back...absolutly
nothing. When we move the mouse around the spreadsheet, it starts
highlighting cells wherever we move the mouse....but we aint
clickin'!!! The strange thing is, no error messages come up. The only
way to close excel once this happens is to go down to the taskbar and
right click excel and select close. Can't click the 'x' in the top
right corner, because as I stated before, it wont let us use anything
like that.

Yes, we have tried a reinstall. We got rid of office entirely, then
reinstalled the lot. Checked for viruses....nadda. So we dont know what
the problem is now......can anyone help!??

 

[Dave Peterson]

And you've tried a different mouse and a different keyboard.

What happens if you start excel in Safe mode:

close excel
windows start button|Run
excel /safe

if nothing bad happens, you may want to read these:

Chip Pearson has some notes on how to diagnose startup errors at:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/StartupErrors.htm

And Jan Karel Pieterse has more notes at:
http://www.jkp-ads.com/Articles/StartupProblems.htm

 

[pinkshiro]

And you've tried a different mouse and a different keyboard.

What happens if you start excel in Safe mode:

close excel
windows start button|Run
excel /safe

if nothing bad happens, you may want to read these:

Chip Pearson has some notes on how to diagnose startup errors at:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/StartupErrors.htm

And Jan Karel Pieterse has more notes at:
http://www.jkp-ads.com/Articles/StartupProblems.htm

Hi Dave, Thanks for the reply.

The computer I am working on is a laptop, so I have tried using a
standard two button ball-mouse, and also unplugging that and using the
touchpad on the laptop.

I tried excel in safe mode and the same symptoms occured.

I have since figured out that if you open excel and dont use the mouse
on it (i.e. just use keyboard shortcuts), excel performs fine. As soon
as I try to use any sort of mouse with excel again, it goes back to how
it was behaving before (even in safe mode).

So it's safe to say its some sort of mouse problem. But is it a
hardware issue? I doubt it since it happens with both the touchpad and
ball-mouse. A software issue? More likely, but I cant for the life of
me figure out what the specific problem is. Maybe there's a corrupted
file somewhere, but like I said in my first post, I have already
removed office entirely and reinstalled.

Any further suggestions/ideas/ solutions? Any help is much
appreciated...

 

[Dave Peterson]

Does this happen in other programs, too?

Maybe it's time to see if there's a new driver for that touchpad?

Or maybe you could post in a forum hosted by the manufacturer (or a newsgroup
dedicated to that laptop maker).

David McRitchie has some notes that you can read. It might give you an idea or
two:
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/ghosting.txt

(Just grasping at straws.)