PowerPoint 2000 hangs on file save

[Rochelle Ray]

The short story is my PowerPoint 2000 hangs when trying to save a
presentation file.



I'm running MS Office 2000 standard on an XP Professional computer. I have
uninstalled and reinstalled PowerPoint without any improvement. I have
completely uninstalled and reinstalled the whole Office suite also without
improvement. The hang problem doesn't happen with Word or Excel, just
PowerPoint.



Here's a sample use case... go for fresh reboot, start PowerPoint, it runs
fine, I can use the wizard to create a new presentation or open an old
presentation, (it doesn't matter which) view the presentation, edit it,
whatever, everything is still fine, but then try to save or save as (it
doesn't matter which) and the save or save as dialog box locks up, mouse
goes to hourglass and I can't do anything other than launching task manager
and killing Powerpoint. Windows tries to do error reporting and this is its
Error Signature:



szAppName : POWERPNT.EXE szAppVer : 9.0.0.3821 szModName : hungapp

szModVer : 0.0.0.0 offset : 00000000



Does anyone have any idea? Microsoft's suggested help is to note that
Office 2000 is no longer supported and I should upgrade. My PowerPoint used
to work fine on this PC, so it makes me wonder which recent automatic
upgrade to XP Pro that Microsoft does for me unexpectedly in the middle of
the night caused my PowerPoint to quit working!

 

[Guest]

Obviously not easy to solve from a distance but here's some ideas......

1. Are you up to date with service packs , don't have 2000 but I think it
should be (at least) SP3? They are still available AFAIK.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...70-47D0-4306-9FA4-8E92D36332FE&displaylang=EN

2. Have you disabled "fast save"?

3. Have you cleared out temp files lately and defragged the drive?

 

[Rochelle Ray]

Thank you John,

I'll make sure I'm up to grade on the service pack, it can't hurt. I doubt
that's it only because the most interesting thing I've realized is a
different user on the same PC doesn't have the same problem with PowerPoint.
The other user account behaves normally. Does this give you any different
insight about what might be wrong with the user account?

I have disable the fast save, but can you share why you think this could
matter?

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

I'll make sure I'm up to grade on the service pack, it can't hurt. I doubt

that's it only because the most interesting thing I've realized is a
different user on the same PC doesn't have the same problem with PowerPoint.

That saves you the tedium of rolling back all those updates to see which caused the problem,
at least. Here are a few things you might try:

- If you typically save to My Documents, try saving to another folder that's not part of your
user profile. Create a C:\TEST folder and see if you can save a file there.

- With PPT *not* running, do a file search for files matching *.PPB
There should be one called [your-username].PCB
Change the extension to .PCA or something then start PPT again, see if behaves better.
The PCB file contains your user customizations and like its same-named chemical counterpart
can be poisonous.

Note that you must first beat Windows until it gives up its silly insistence on hiding the
extensions of known file types, else it won't work. Here's the baseball bat you'll need for
that:

Make Windows show file extensions and hidden files
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00781.htm

- Do you have any addins installed (that the other user doesn't)?

What add-ins are loaded?
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00655.htm

 

[Kathy Jacobs]

As to your fast saves question: One of the reasons fast saves could affect
this is because fast saves may as well be called slow opens. When you make
changes with fast saves turned on, the changes are stored at the end of the
file. When the file is opened the next time, PPT has to sort all of the
changes back into their correct places in the file - that takes time.

So, why would that cause a problem with saving the files? Because once the
number of changes reaches a certain threshold, PPT tries to sort them in on
save as well to create you a newer, smaller copy of the file.

I would try turning off Fast Saves, then open and re-save one of the files
you are having problems with under a new name. See if it works better.

--
Kathy Jacobs, Microsoft MVP OneNote and PowerPoint
Author of Kathy Jacobs on PowerPoint
Get PowerPoint and OneNote information at www.onppt.com

I believe life is meant to be lived. But:
if we live without making a difference, it makes no difference that we lived