Office won't force quit

[crmarvin42]

Can any one help me. I've been dealing with this problem for as long
as I can remember, and it's getting worse. Occationally, when waking
the computer from sleep, or for no apparent reason, office will freeze.
when I attempt to force quit, the excel icon disapears from the
option-apple-esc window, but the triangle indicating that the program
is running doesn't go away. Hitting option-apple-esc again shows that
excel is still running. I've even gone so far as to use the terminal
and try to kill the process. I can find 1 or 2 obvious processes to
kill, but not the offending one. The only way to get the offending
program to quit, is to do a hard reset of my computer, because the
logout will always time out since the offending office program won't
quit. I've used every version of office for OS X, and i've tried every
possible combination of patches. Can someone tell me how to force this
program to quit without screwing up my computer by doing a hard reset?

-Joshua

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Can any one help me. I've been dealing with this problem for as long
as I can remember, and it's getting worse. Occationally, when waking
the computer from sleep, or for no apparent reason, office will freeze.
when I attempt to force quit, the excel icon disapears from the
option-apple-esc window, but the triangle indicating that the program
is running doesn't go away. Hitting option-apple-esc again shows that
excel is still running. I've even gone so far as to use the terminal
and try to kill the process. I can find 1 or 2 obvious processes to
kill, but not the offending one. The only way to get the offending
program to quit, is to do a hard reset of my computer, because the
logout will always time out since the offending office program won't
quit. I've used every version of office for OS X, and i've tried every
possible combination of patches. Can someone tell me how to force this
program to quit without screwing up my computer by doing a hard reset?

-Joshua

Well, do you also have trouble forcing excel to quit from the Activity
monitor? Have you repaired your disk permissions after doing an install?

 

[CyberTaz]

In addition to Bob's offerings, I may be reading into your post, but I get
the impression that you may leave your system running (almost, at least)
constantly *and* with programs launched. If I'm right, this can also trigger
the type of behavior you describe. Even if you don't want to power the
system OFF, at least quit all apps before leaving it sit for extended
periods. It is also recommendable to restart the computer *at least* once
per week.

Apple's Discussions forum has been littered with wake-from-sleep issues
since OS X was first introduced. The symptoms of the problem can range
greatly depending on any number of variables including model of Mac,
specific OS version, software/utilities installed (including drivers), RAM,
etc. Unfortunately the solutions are just as numerous as the situations that
call for them.

 

[LRL]

Leaving Office X open overnight on Panther was a recipe for disaster
for me. If I'd forgotten to quit the program the night before, then
quitting Office X was necessary or it would crash pretty soon after
starting to do stuff. Office 2004 on Tiger is better but it too will
eventually crash. I've not had the inability to force quit though. By
freeze, I suppose you get the pinwheel of death. I'm going to assume
that killing it via the Activity Monitor also fails to kill off Excel.
You might try looking into the Console.log and the System.log to see if
there are any interesting messages after you've tried to kill it. Are
you sudo'ing the kill command? Have you tried logging in at the
terminal as root to kill it?

On another note, I leave my machine on all the time to run folding@home
(InCrease) so my machines don't sleep, and I always leave my apps
running. Except for msft apps. My guess is that they have a common
memory pool algorithm that doesn't work well under MacOS X.