Excel2000/Win98SE crashes on exit

[Lois]

Excel crashes on exit, or causes my system to crash on exit.

CTRL-ALT-DEL reveals system busy waiting for the Close Program Dialog Box to
be displayed followed by Warnings about system instability and finally a GPF
in GDI.exe.

This is consistently reproducible and extremely annoying. I think I've
actually had and solved this problem in the past, but it's been over a year,
so I no longer remember the solution. I haven't found anything in
Microsoft's knowledge base that matches my issue.

I've also tried repairing my Office installation, but that hasn't helped
either.

I'm running Windows 98SE, with Office 2000 on a Dell 500 Pentium III.

Any references to solutions would be most appreciated.

Lois

 

[Dave Peterson]

Just a guess...

One of the things that excel does when you close it is update the file that
holds the toolbar settings (*.xlb).

Try using Windows|find to search for *.xlb. Rename all you find to *.xlbOLD.

Sometimes this file gets bloated and corrupted so that it causes problems with
excel.

(I rebuilt my *.xlb file and it went from 450K to 12K--but I was lucky. I
didn't experience any problems (well, that I know of).)

Test excel out a bit and if it helped, dump the *.xlbOLD files and customize
your toolbars at your leisure.

 

[Lois]

Thanks for the suggestion, Dave. Actually, in browsing the Knowledge Base I
stumbled on this article which jogged my memory from when I had the problem
before.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;248172&Product=xlw2K
Although I already have the updated version that they say fixed the problem,
I turned off all Add-Ins just for laughs. For now, everything seems OK.
Your Toolbar suggestion is also something that I recall messing with when
I've had problems in the past. I appreciate your help!

Lois

 

[Dave Peterson]

Glad you got the problem fixed.

But it kind of sounds like a coincidence that the problem went away--especially
since you say you have the newer release.

Maybe it was the addin itself that was having trouble.

 

[Lois]

Yes, I believe it was a problem with an add-in. I have all of them turned
off at the moment. I guess I could incrementally turn them on and see which
one breaks it, but I'm too lazy. Thanks again for your suggestion. I think
bloated toolbars can also be a problem. ;-)

Lois

 

[Dave Peterson]

I've suffered from that disease (too lazy) too. Hope the problem stays away.