Multiple instances, one crashes.

[izzy]

Running Excel2000 on Win2000.
No screensaver and no other operations running. All motherboard chips running clean and cool. 1.4-Ghz & 256-Ram

I am running three instances of excel with between five and eight documents open in each one. All open woorkbooks total 7.6-MB in size. Each file has only three very simple formulas. Basicly files used to log data manualy once per hour.
Randomly once a week or so one of those instances of excel freezes up and can not be called up(maximized). The other two instances are completely usable and running fine. Force closing the frozen instance of excel does not effect the others. Task manager shows the two instances of "excel.exe" running with the third one marked as "EM_excel.exe". Performance shows CPU usage spiked to 90%+.


My question is; Is having so many documents and sessions open at once a known issue? Meaning I do not fully understand the common fix (below).
Or is it a bit more likely I am having hardware problems?





Googling a wide range of parameters for this issue all resulting in removing check for "windows in taskbar". But.... the issues that prompted those answers were due to crashes which all instances of excel must be forced to close and sometimes blue screen of death.

 

[jdc]

Hi

Just wondering why you're opening new instances of excel when all your documents/worksheets could be opened under one instance of excel.

John

 

[izzy]

I am running three instances of excel with between five and eight documents open in each one.

And each instance is used to divide up different product groups. We find it more efficient to use three different instances because we need to refer back to these documents constantly to enter data and print labels throughout the work day. (Different documents depending on customer orders) Searching through the "More" drop down list of 24 documents 24 to 48 times per hour realy slows us down.


We do use custom menu buttons top run macros for some things. I was hoping I could use this feature for this somehow but have not found the time to study it here at MrExcel.