2007 Chart Crashes or Hangs after Office 2007 SP2 or Feb/April CU Applied

Aaron Rykhus — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:17:00 GMT

An issue has recently been discovered in PowerPoint 2007 where the application will hang while working with a 2007 chart object (not the legacy MS Graph chart). The PowerPoint product team is aware of this issue and a fix is planned for the August timeframe. Please be advised this date can change based on a number of factors.

The hang occurs as a result of the following behaviors after installing Service Pack 2:

1. Clicking very fast multiple times in a chart object

2. Using the arrow keys on the keyboard to quickly navigate through the object

3. Quickly copying and pasting entire charts or chart elements

The error signature for this hang may include references to OfficeLifeBoatHang as the Event Type.

There's an updated hotfix, the KB article is:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975021

To get the hotfix click on View and request hotfix downloads at top of that KB article, accept terms, fill out form and submit.

We now have a KB (961223) for the "No Disk" error in Word/PowerPoint

Aaron Rykhus — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:03:00 GMT

If you're getting this error: "There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive D:."

*In this case drive D is the CD-ROM drive and PowerPoint is the application you're starting.

See this knowledge base article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961223

Finding useful crash data and Windows Error Reporting (WER)

Aaron Rykhus — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:17:00 GMT

Also check out http://blogs.msdn.com/wer/pages/faq.aspx#weronpc

Application Log

Whenever an application crashes (faulting application) you should get the message <application name> stopped working. Once that occurs the crash details get logged in the Application Log as an Error event. If the report is sent to Microsoft the Application Log will also have an Information event that contains a Bucket ID.

On Windows Vista, you can open Event Viewer by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Maintenance, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Event Viewer.? If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

Expand Windows Logs and select Application to select the Application log:

Look on the right, a crash in an Office application should be an Error under the Level column, Application Error under the Source column, and 1000 under the Event ID column.

Crash

Example: crash from Outlook

Fault Bucket (bucket ID)

If the report was sent to us (Microsoft) there should be an Information event with Windows Error Reporting under the Source column and event ID 1001, with all the data gathered in the details.

On support calls, the piece of data that's most important to me is the Fault bucket that's reported. I'll usually refer to it as the bucket ID.

Problem Reports and Solutions (new in Vista)

A new feature in Windows Vista is Problem Reports and Solutions in the Control Panel under the System and Maintenance category (if you don't have Classic View turned on). This will contain all the crash and hang events that occurred on a computer along with settings to configure reporting to Microsoft.

To open Problem Reports and Solution in Windows Vista (not in previous versions of Windows:

1. Open Problem Reports and Solutions by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Maintenance, and then clicking Problem Reports and Solutions.

2. In the left pane, click View problem history.

3. To view problems by product, date, problem type, or solution status, click the column name.

Bucket ID is the same as the Fault bucket in the application log event. I prefer using Problem Reports and Solutions versus Application Log to get crash details.

More info:

Where it's stored:

http://blogs.msdn.com/wer/pages/faq.aspx#weronpc

See problem reports for this computer

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/74274b33-52ea-40a4-bed5-9444c2a178a31033.mspx

Windows Error Reporting and the Problem Reports and Solutions Feature in Windows Vista

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709644.aspx

Choose the information to send when a problem occurs

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/15d43eb3-45fd-4248-8bd5-2ed92ee298961033.mspx

Open Event Viewer (Windows Vista)

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/a99f69c1-935f-4116-ba5f-33d8800ef9da1033.mspx

How to create a user-mode process dump file in Windows Vista

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931673

How to use ADPlus to troubleshoot "hangs" and "crashes"

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/286350

Aaron Rykhus - News and info on Office client apps : Office

2007 Chart Crashes or Hangs after Office 2007 SP2 or Feb/April CU Applied

We now have a KB (961223) for the "No Disk" error in Word/PowerPoint

Finding useful crash data and Windows Error Reporting (WER)