Wow, PPT 2003 Slow and Crashing

[Rich Weil]

Hello,

You know the feeling you get when you load new software and you wonder why
you did so when the old was working perfectly fine? Well, I've got that
feeling with my upgrade from 2002 to 2003 and I'm just a few minutes from
uninstalling. All of a sudden my PPT files all open slowly, even ones less
then 250kb. I've already had to reboot the computer because it started
hanging while trying to paste some text into PPT, something I ALWAYS did
with PPT 2002 without a flaw. I've already had two incidents of having to
recover PPT files and now I have Recovered files which is just annoying as
hell, particularly when they hang up the computer trying to open them (I
couldn't open email while trying to "recover" one of the recovered files).
Feels like Windows 98.

So, my question is, is this what I can expect from 2003? I am running XP
home with 512megs of RAM and I never had any of these problems with 2002.
Nothing else has changed on my computer with the exception of the Office
Suite 2003 upgrade. Like I said, I'm minutes from an uninstall and would
appreciate any feedback.

Thank you.

 

[Rich Weil]

Never mind. I went ahead and uninstalled. It is running entirely too slowly.
Every presentation opens slowly, and when they finally do open the
presentation takes minutes for the slides to load in normal view, plus all
my other applications open slowy when PPT is trying to load, and the
computer is just not running right. When I have a couple of idle hours with
nothing to do I might try to install again, but for today I have work to do
and don't feel like making the day a complete waste of time.

 

[Michael Koerner]

Did you also install the Service Patch. This fixed a lot of the known problems
in 2003

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Michael Koerner [MS PPT MVP]


Never mind. I went ahead and uninstalled. It is running entirely too slowly.
Every presentation opens slowly, and when they finally do open the
presentation takes minutes for the slides to load in normal view, plus all
my other applications open slowy when PPT is trying to load, and the
computer is just not running right. When I have a couple of idle hours with
nothing to do I might try to install again, but for today I have work to do
and don't feel like making the day a complete waste of time.

 

[Echo S]

Hi, Rich,

Office 2003 shouldn't be acting like this. Something's definitely wrong
there.

Do you use Norton Antivirus? If so, disable the Office plug-in. See Norton
Anti-Virus and Office
http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00387.htm for specific instrux.

Also, try changing hardware acceleration. How to set graphics hardware
acceleration back
http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00129.htm

Do you have anything running in the background? For example, when I have
this game, Luxor, minimized on my taskbar -- even if it's not opened to a
play screen, Outlook 2003 becomes a total dog, and I almost always have to
use CAD to close it. That stupid game is the biggest resources hog -- if I
have anything else running, I have to Alt+Tab to get to those applications
just to turn them off because clicking them on the taskbar doesn't do much
of anything except stall stuff out even worse. Sometimes I'll close the game
but it's still running -- when I CAD, I see it on the process list still --
and I can always tell when that's happening because it takes FOR-EV-ER for
any other application or file to open. Once I kill luxor.exe in the process
list, though, all is well again.

Another example -- when I was beta testing Office 2003, I'd get these freaky
flashing screens on slides where I had charts with gradient fills. I kept
thinking I'd end up having a seizure or something, the flashing was so bad.
I think I finally figured out that if I left SETI running in the background
on my system, the chart screens would flash. When I turned SETI off, no
flashing.

So anyway, I had the same flashing at the office the other day on a regular
(non-beta) version of Office 2003. I'm not 100% positive, but I'm pretty
sure in this case it was simply an issue of having too much open (photoshop,
illustrator, ppt 2003, outlook 2003, and outlook express and probably an IE
window or two, too) and not having rebooted my system in too many days. So I
closed everything down, rebooted, reopened PPT, and all was well. Go figure.

All I'm saying is that I have a feeling something in the background is
contributing here. Try going to Start/Run and type msconfig in the box. Then
disable everything in the startup, install Office, and let the system reboot
(again with no startup stuff). See if Office works okay then. If it does,
you can turn on the startup stuff one at a time until you can isolate the
problem.

I agree with Michael that you want to install SP-1, but you shouldn't have
these kinds of lags even without it. So I think you'll want to get Office
2003 up and running in a stable manner, then install SP-1.