Powerpoint stops responding

[Mike Weston]

Hi

I have a delphi application automating powerpoint and all works fine.....
however after a while powerpoint simply stops responding and has to be end
tasked. Has anyone had a similar experience or got any suggestions?

Regards

Mike

 

[Mike Weston]

Hi Greg

I am running Powerpoint 2000 originally it was SR1 so I have now upgraded to
service pack 3 to see how that goes, in essence my application simply
updates some text boxes in the powerpoint once a second, the application
runs fine apart from a slight memory leak in powerpoint but then powerpoint
stops responding. I am retesting to see if the SP3 has made any difference
and will get back to you.

Cheers

Mike

 

[Greg Ellison [MS]]

Hello Mike,

Thanks for the reply. What operating system is this running on? If this
is Windows 9x then you may be running into the problem discussed in the
following article:

216400 - PRB: Cross-Process COM Automation Can Hang Client Application on
Win95/98
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;216400

Does it happen on more than one computer? Have you tested it on a computer
running Windows XP? Do you know if this also happens from a VB application
automating PowerPoint? Make sure you are releasing object references when
they are no longer needed. Also to possibly concerve resources in
PowerPoint while your application is running, you can try turning off Allow
Fast Saves, AutoRecovery, Background printing, Smart Cut/Paste, Spell check
as you type, and lowering the Maximum number of Undos. These options are
available in PowerPoint under the Tools, Options menu.

For information and sample code for integrating Office with Visual Basic,
Visual C++, Internet Scripts, and other programming languages, please see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/VSOfficeDev.htm. This site
contains the most up-to-date information for using developer tools for
Office integration and extensibility.

Best regards,
Greg Ellison
Microsoft Developer Support

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

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[Jerry]

You might want to look at my previous post 'Can PowerPoint be automated
reliably?' originally posted on 7-21. We never did find a resolution to
the problem on Win95/win98, despite many attempts. I messed with the code,
tried applying service packs, installed Vis Studio on the target machine,
inserted numerous 'Sleeps' all to no avail. My code was written in VB
(although I had also tried it using C++/MFC with similar results) and EVERY
version of the code worked properly under Win 2000 or WinXP ... and NONE of
the versions worked reliably under Win95 or Win98. The results were
extremely random ... testing by running the same data thru the program
numerous times, it failed at various, seemingly random points. I'd be VERY
interested if you manage to get your code running properly under
win95/win98.