PowerPoint Automation Problem HResult: 0x8001010A

[CodeHulk]

Hello all,

I designed a small app which is designed to watch a folder and grab office
documents (Excel, Word, and Powerpoint) as they come in then replace the
footer and make a pdf copy. This has been running fine for its purpose. It
runs on Windows XP and uses the office 2003 (Office 11) libraries. Its work
load is usually very small but does have some heavy moments.

I extracted some of the functionality to do some upgrades to it and slapped
it into a new project (all developement was done in C# using VS2005). I am
running Vista Business and Office 2007 on my development box. I developement
a small app which all it did was traverse a directory and strip the footer
from all the powerpoint presentations it comes across. I am constantly
getting the following error:

"The message filter indicated that the application is busy. (Exception from
HRESULT: 0x8001010A (RPC_E_SERVERCALL_RETRYLATER))"

I've never recieved this on the other box. The FooterStripper app (for lack
of better name) definately has heavier throughput. It will show up numerous
times, sometimes crashing the app as an unhandled exception and sometimes
just being written to my log in a catch block. It also happens in different
locations without any consistency to it at all.

I checked out an article in the KB about problems with Word 2000 and Norton
AV causing this problem, however, I have neither of them installed. So any
help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Chirag]

It may be the case that the Office application is showing a dialog box and
waiting on user input. Try turning on visibility of the app to see what is
happening. You might also want to manually open the document and see if the
corresponding Office app is prompting you to do something. Also, later, turn
off prompts by setting Application.DisplayAlerts to False, etc.

In any case, errors like RPC_E_SERVERCALL_RETRYLATER,
RPC_S_SERVER_UNAVAILABLE, RPC_S_SERVER_TOO_BUSY, RPC_E_RETRY should be
handled in the client application because in these cases the server is
asking the client to retry after a certain interval.

- Chirag

PowerShow - View multiple PowerPoint slide shows simultaneously
http://officeone.mvps.org/powershow/powershow.html

 

[CodeHulk]

They weren't blocking by waiting for a dialog to get clicked or anything.
What I ended up doing is catching the errors and looping back if the message
contains 'RPC_E_SERVERCALL_RETRYLATER' etc. The code seems to be resolving
like it should after looping several times. Almost as though there was just
a timing issue between when one file is done processing and when the other
begins. Should this looping technique be adequate in resolving the conflict?
I occasionaly get another error, seemingly the same problem with a seperate
message.

'Creating an instance of the COM component with CLSID
{91493441-5A91-11CF-8700-00AA0060263B} from the IClassFactory failed due to
the following error: 8001010a'

I would assume this to be the same error as '8001010a' is the error from the
previous problem.

Thanks for your reply Chirag, I've been ripping my hair out on all the
automation stuff for some time and have a horrid time trying to get
assistance.

~Justin

 

[Chirag]

Hi Justin,

When you loop back, place something like 50 millisecond sleep between each
iteration. This would ensure that CPU is not tied up waiting for your loop
when it is better used in processing the file by the Office app.

Are you trying to automate Office apps from Windows/Web service?

- Chirag

PowerShow - View multiple PowerPoint slide shows simultaneously
http://officeone.mvps.org/powershow/powershow.html