Excel Crashing

[Brian from Maui]

Dreamboat and Jack,

Appreciate both your help.
When I do the regedit thing, and I change to Old Excel, it works once. When I go back to regedit, there's the Microsoft Excel and the Old Excel.
The only times it crashes is when I go to the General tab to default Excel to open my folder where I keep my Excel files.

Any more ideas. I also visited that site you gave Dreamboat and did what it said, to no avail.

Brian

[Anne Troy]

Hey, Brian. Have you ever run msconfig on your PC to see what's running in the background? Office 97 has a little program called FindFast that should definitely not be running as its known to cause problems.

You say you reinstalled Office a couple of times. When you did that, did you use Eraser? In order for the registry to be properly cleared of Office, you need to use it (both Office 97 and 2000 have it). It should either be on your CD or you can download it from:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q254250

Please take all of the precautions mentioned.

Also, my husband has XP and changes he's made in settings that *should* change the registry were gone after a reboot. Sounds suspiciously similar and I wonder if it doesn't have to do with all this *user* stuff that's integrated with XP. I will ask the OS gurus on Monday about this anomaly. Meanwhile, of course, if you somehow manage to take care of this, I'd love to know.

[Brian from Maui]

Dreamboat,

I think I figured out the problem. My default folder for Excel is:
c:documents and settingMy NameMy Documents

which still has me clicking on my subfolder which is named Excel to get to my files. So when I add Excel after My Documents, it crashes. I will have to change Excel to something else. I haven't tried it, but hope thats the problem. I'll look at the link you provided, this is driving me nuts!

Brian

[Brian from Maui]

Dreamboat,

Renaming my folder doesn't work. It still crashes. However I noticed when I run regedit, the window on the right says:

Default...no value set.. what does that mean?

Brian

[Anne Troy]

Brian:

ALL registry entries have a default entry. And just so you understand...

When Excel (or any of the Office apps) run, they look for their settings in the registry (as well as a couple of other places). Specifically, Excel will look in that Excel folder you renamed. When you launched Excel, it did not find its folder in the registry, so it recreated it. That is what it's supposed to do. Hence, if there's any corruption in the Excel registry, we've wiped it out. But if the problem got worse, we could delete the new Excel registry folder and rename the old one from *OldExcel* back to *Excel* and when we launch Excel again, it would see the settings it had before.

Secondly, Excel looks first in a folder (on your hard drive--if you're at home) called XLSTART. Generally, unless you have a personal.xls file in which you store macros, there should not be anything in that folder. If you have Acrobat (not Reader, but the full version) or PDF Writer and certain other programs, they may have a file in there also. You can check that folder to see if anything is in it. If so, why don't you temporarily move those files somewhere else and see if the problem remains.

Thirdly, Excel will look in a folder that you have told it to under Tools-Options, General tab. If you have named anything in the box called *Alternate Startup Folder*, you may want to (at least) temporarily remove that as well. Many people confuse this with their default file location, which it is not. The *average* Excel user won't have anything in that box. If they do, they should know why, and how it affects Excel's operation.

I hope this sheds a little more light. Thorough troubleshooting of any of the applications can take many steps. To provide them all in one answer would take me too much time and I'd be able to help far fewer askers than I do now. This is one of the reasons I finally created my own web--so I can point people to information that I provide regularly without having to type it over and over.

I'll be here until we get this issue resolved. If you post and I don't respond, don't hesitate to PM me or email me directly to get me back in here. Without email notifications, I can be forgetful.

My shortfall in your issue is that I have no real experience with Windows XP. I have checked, however, and the registry is in the same folder as it has been since Windows 95.

One more thing. Find and rename your *.xlb file. It should be called something like brian.xlb somewhere on your hard drive--just do a search for *.xlb. This is your toolbars settings in Excel, and who knows---maybe there's something there. Just move the file to your desktop or something.

Any of my suggestions should be done with Excel CLOSED or they won't work.

Hope this information sheds some light, but even more, I hope we get this resolved!!

[Anne Troy]

****I POSTED THIS IN THE WRONG QUESTION****


Brian:

More than likely you have spaces or numbers or something. Procedures must be one-word names. Use underscores_____if you must.

_________________
TheWordExpert

[ This Message was edited by: Dreamboat on 2002-04-07 08:29 ]

[Brian from Maui]

Dreamboat,

Mahalo for all the time and effort. I'll try your suggestions. Right now my work around it just to leave my default folder as is and everything works fine. It's just clicking on another folder to display my Excel files, that has me bothered, after opening Excel.
Again thank-you for your time

Brian

[Jack in the UK]

Hi Brain

take care friend Dreamboat is looking after you best both dont advise.

take care friend

[Brian from Maui]

I've noticed that when I open Excel, it opens to Book 2, whereas it should be Book 1. Also when trying to change the default settings in Tools/Options/General, it will let me change to:
C:Documents and SettingsMy NameMy DocumentsExcel, from
C:Documents and Settings|My NameMy Documents.

Then it stars crashing everytime I want to use Tools. Very strange. Anyone else has this problem with XP and Excel?

Brian

[Anne Troy]

The fact that it is opening as Book2 indicates to me that there is a file that is intruding somewhere. Again, this points to either the XLSTART folder or a folder you have named as the Alternate Startup folder under Tools-Options-General tab. Did you understand, Brian, that there should not be anything in that box under Alternate Startup folder?

Do me a favor. Hit Window-Unhide. Is there a file there that you can unhide?

_________________
TheWordExpert

[ This Message was edited by: Dreamboat on 2002-04-07 09:09 ]