Flash drives & Programs
Had a home business customer today having problems opening powerpoint. It would quickly open but then would suck up 99% cpu and do nothing else. After a quick reinstall of Microsoft Office he still had the problem. As I was troubleshooting this and coming up short on google I had him create another user on his XP machine. Logged in as the new user and powerpoint opened just fine. I figured it might be a temp directory problem. Emptied that and still came up with 99% cpu usage. I looked in his recent documents for .ppt files. I saw a bunch that pointed to an e:\ drive. He is opening documents right from a flash drive.
I took a stroll through the registry and found the key that powerpoint uses to store recently opened files. Deleted the tree. Powerpoint opened just fine.
The reason for this issue is simple. When you open powerpoint it first brings up a list of recent presentations. His computer was looking for these documents but because the flash drive was not plugged in It couldn’t find them and just never timed out. He was using office 2000 and come to think of it I have seen similar issues with flash drives and different types of documents and programs. I’m doing some testing to see if this problem crops up on any newer versions of office or windows.
May 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 am
Had exactly the same problem but was unable to detect the problem (ended up in system’s reinstall). Thank you very much for the solution:)