EXCEL will not load

[Karl B.]

I am running Windows 98 and Office 2000, and it has worked fine for years.
A couple of days ago I started to have some problems. I cannot identify
what I may done to create the problems. Friday morning it was working fine
when I started work. I then went on to delete some (quite a few)
unnecessary files, and ran Disk. defrag. with Norton Systemworks.
By about noon I was having trouble loading EXCEL. I got a message that the
system was low on recourses. I have 640 MB of Ram, and I can load Word no
problem, as well as AUTOCad, a much larger program than both Excel and Word.
I have had this error message show up: "Excel caused a general protection
fault in module USER.EXE at 0003:00003d34" The extension has varied from
0003:00003d34 to 0006:0000575f to 0004:00000499
Just now I got the message: EXCEL caused an invalid page fault in module
USER.EXE at 0006:000056f4

I have tried to uninstall and reinstall office however this has not
corrected the problem.

Any suggestions?

 

[Dave Peterson]

This may help:

OFF2000: Utility to Completely Remove Remaining Office CD1 Files and
Registry Entries
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=239938

But first, I'd try opening excel in safe mode:

close excel (if you got it open!)
windows start button|Run
excel /safe

Does it load ok?

If yes, then maybe something that excel loads whenever it startups is causing an
error.

One of the potential problems is a corrupted customized toolbar file.

close excel
windows start button|find/search for *.xlb

rename them to *.xlbOLD
and try it normally again. If it worked ok, then dump those *.xlbOLD files
and recreate your toolbars at your leisure.

If it didn't help, rename them back to *.xlb and see if there's something else
that's causing the trouble.

Maybe there's a workbook/addin that's causing the trouble.

You can use some techniques that Chip Pearson shares on his web site:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/StartupErrors.htm

Essentially, you're going to move stuff out of your XLStart folder and uncheck
everything under Tools|Addins. (But keep track!)

Then one by one, you'll add one back and restart excel to see if that caused the
problem.

Then if none of that helped, I'd try the suggestion in the MSKB.