There have been several issues that occur when editing charts in PowerPoint 2007 after Service Pack 2 is installed, or hotfix KB966311 is installed. The main symptom is PowerPoint will stop responding (hang) when you are working on a chart. You'll see (Not Responding) in the Title bar and will have to go into Task Manager to End Task.

We have come out with several hotfixes for these issues:

These occur if you have hotfix KB 966311 or Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 installed:

KB 975021 -  When you move, resize, or adjust graphs, Microsoft Office PowerPoint crashes.

KB 976479 - Take certain actions in PowerPoint, it becomes unresponsive. For example, this problem occurs if you select a chart in a presentation, and then you press and hold the DOWN ARROW key.

KB 981047 - If multiple presentations that contain charts are used at the same time, PowerPoint may crash.

KB 2028572 - No new updates, just the latest OART.DLL with the fix.

So which update should I install? I'd recommend the latest KB 2028572. The updates are cumulative so each one should contain updates from the previous updates.

How do I get the hotfix? There's a link at the top of the articles to view and request hotfixes. Fill out the form and you'll get an email with a link and password to the hotfix. If there's no link in the article call Customer Service at 800-MICROSOFT, reference the KB article # and request that hotfix described in the article.

What if my company/administrator won't let me install the hotfix? There's a workaround but you need to do it every time you run PowerPoint on each instance of PowerPoint. It's setting the processor affinity on the POWERPNT.EXE process.

Steps

1. With PowerPoint running, open Task Manager, by right-clicking on the Task Bar, choosing Task Manager, or by doing CTRL+ALT+DELETE and choosing Task Manager.

2. Select the Processes tab, right-click POWERPNT.EXE, click Set Affinity...

3. Uncheck all CPUs except one, click OK, and close Task Manager.

Shot from Windows 7 64-bit computer with Intel Core 2 vPro processor

In theory, there's another workaround that involves disabling multiple CPUs or CPU cores in the BIOS. I don't like recommending that though unless the chart hang issue is a real showstopper and you can't install the hotfixes. You should be familiar with modifying the BIOS and understand that you can mess up your computer, even stop it from starting if you're not careful. If you're not comfortable with modifying the BIOS or have never done so before, I would contact the computer manufacturer, or consult a professional computer support technician.

There is an issue affecting Visio 2003 and 2007 users when they use the Search for Shapes feature.  This is caused by a combination of the permanent retirement of the Shape Search servers and a temporary server redirection problem. 

Normally Visio 2003 and 2007 would silently fail to search the (now retired) online servers, and continue to return search results from the local stencil files.  Unfortunately, the lack of proper redirecting causes the failure dialog which interrupts the search process.

When users try to search, they receive the error shown below instead of getting shape results.

Work Around
The work around is to disable the internet location for shape searching, which is no longer needed:

1. Select the Tools menu, then choose Options, then select the Shape Search tab
2. Expand the Search Locations
3. Uncheck the box for "The Internet" location
4. Click OK to save the options

More Information
The Visio "Search for Shapes" feature in 2003 and 2007 was designed to allow users to search both local stencil files and online shape servers.  In Visio 2010, the search feature is only searching the local stencil files for Visio shapes, and does not attempt to query a web server.

The Visio Shape Search servers were retired earlier this year, as documented in KB article 2019049:
Search for Shapes feature in Visio to search on the Internet is discontinued

The shapes that were previously found using the Internet search are now packaged for download from the Office Download site.  You can use this link to see the download options: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio-help/find-more-shapes-and-stencils-HA010369716.aspx