PP crashes on slide show

[Guest]

Hi --

I have a problem in Powerpoint 2002 SP3 where PP will crash when I start the
slide show. I have searched this forum, MS KB and Google/Google groups for
solutions and haven't found anything that works.

This problem only happens with certain slideshows. In the past year, I'd
say about 33% of ppt files caused this problem. The size of the ppt doesn't
seem to matter. It's crashed with a 300K ppt and a 20MB ppt. I haven't been
able to find any similarities with all the "bad" ppts.

So far I've tried updating my video drivers (ATI), installing a different
video card (nVidia) with updated drivers...still crashes. Ran Windows Update
and Office Update. No luck. Disabled hardware acceleration in Display
Properties and in the PP Slide Show setup. No luck.

This is a P3 866 with 128MB RAM and 20 GB HDD. nVidia Geforce4MX. It is
attached to a Smartboard. There is Smartboard software installed on this
PC...this may be relevant since the software has PP integration (mainly to
use the board to control PP slideshows). Windows 2004 SP4 fully patched with
Office XP SP3 fully patched.

Anyone have any ideas?

thx/Clay

 

[Echo S]

Only thing I can think is you're on the right track with the smart board.
Thanks for explaining what all you've already tried so we don't waste your
time and ours repeating history!

Have you tried disabling all background programs to see if maybe something
running in the background (like the smartboard) is causing a conflict?

Go to Start|Run and type msconfig You can disable all startup applications
there. Do that, reboot, and see if PPT works okay on some of the problem
presentations. If so, re-enable apps one at a time until you can isolate the
problem.

Oh, also, 128MB RAM isn't very much at all. Any chance you can add memory?
At least another 128MB would be helpful for performance in general. I don't
know that this is causing the problem, but I'm sure it won't hurt to
increase the RAM. I just worked on my mom's old computer -- it's a P3 700
(or maybe 800?) with 192MB RAM. (It came with 64MB, and I added 128MB.) If
she planned to hang onto this system any longer, I would add some RAM,
because it would help quite a bit, I think. (Plus, she's complaining about
how slow it is. )

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Hi and to echo Echo, thanks for all the detail. I suspect the bit about Windows
2004 is a bit wide of the mark, but let's ignore that for now. ;-)

Have you checked with the whiteboard manufacturer to see if there are updates or
known issues with either the version of PPT+SP in use or other factors?

Does PPT still crash on starting a slide show if you disable or uninstall the
whiteboard software?

 

[Guest]

The SMART Board sucks up a lot of resources and is likely to be the culprit.
We used a laptop computer and had nothing but problems with it freezing up.
We ended up getting a computer with a whole lot more RAM and that fixed the
problem.