Office 2007 Crashing on Vista 64-bit?

[Bill Morgan]

We have several workstations running Vista Business 64-bit with 8GB RAM.
These workstations primarily run SolidWorks 2009, which is a CAD program, but
also run Office Small Business 2007. All OS & Office updates are applied
from the Microsoft Update website. This website:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/co...ness & Home Office&sc=Office Suites&os=32-bit

Shows that Office 2007 is compatible with 64-bit Operating Systems, and is
Vista certified. However, since installing on Vista 64-bit (it was installed
as a fresh install of both the OS and Office, not an upgrade), Office has
been nearly unusable. Powerpoint, Excel, and Word all crash (this morning
Powerpoint would crash simply when trying to add text to a slide) randomly
and often. Outlook crashes almost every time it is used. Opening
attachments, sending email, and even just closing the application (yes, I
said closing the application!) all cause it to crash.

Has anyone run into this before? Any suggestions as to how to resolve this
issue?

 

[Chris Davis]

Hey Bill,

We have the same exact configuration and the same problem - random crashes.
We also have problems in Solidworks being slow or crashing. The files are of
course very large and being pulled across Gigabit Ethernet and our tests
indicate the speed of the network is not to blame.

We took extreme care to setup all the workstations identically and made sure
they did not have unnecessary 3rd party garbage that could foul things up.
After much tinkering and tests, talks with Solid Experts, there are really
only a couple things that we think it could be.

1. Some things in Vista business 64 simply require modifying write
permissions to certain directories and/or running as an admin user
2. We also think or symantec real time scan is doing something funky to the
files when it copies to a temp folder over the network.

I wonder if these two things are at all related - out of curiosity, what AV
software are you running, and how do you have it configured? We are testing
shutting off the real time scanning to see if the problems continue. Between
Solidworks not working and the random office crashes it continues to be a
huge drain on productivity!

Thanks for the post - I am in a way glad that other people are having the
same problem - maybe we can get this figured out yet!

Chris Davis
METI Helpdesk Admin

After

 

[Bill Morgan]

Hi Chris!

This seems to be a somewhat common problem with this configuration as I have
found a couple other folks experiencing this same problem.

Our users have local admin rights on their workstations.

We also load our SolidWorks files from a server via a Gigabit network.
SolidWorks runs locally, but the design files are on the server.

We run Symantec End Point Security 11.0. We are using all features (outlook
scanning, AV, etc). We have uninstalled this software (we could do that
since it was just one layer in our security scheme) with no impact on the
problem.

One note... due to the issues we were having with SolidWorks on Win XP
32-bit, we originally deployed these Vista Bus 64-bit workstations as
dedicated SolidWorks platforms. All other "administrative" apps were run on
a separate PC. We had absolutely no issues with this configuration -
SolidWorks ran great (again, as good as it can). The dual PC desk situation
proved too cumbersome, however, so we combined the apps onto the Vista 64-bit
workstations. Office 2007 has been crashing ever since. It's the only app
that seems to be crashing for us, and it's all parts of Office (Excel, Word,
Powerpoint, Outlook) that crash.

Also, MS Office 2007 Diagnostics did find and fix one issue (no idea what it
was since it doesn't tell you what it found or how it fixed it), but it has
not made a difference.

Thankfully, our SolidWorks 2009 installations are reasonably stable (or at
least as stable as SW can be - I am convinced that this is not a well-written
piece of software).

We did catch a moment when the Task Mgr on one of the machines said we had 4
KB of memory available. I am not sure what "cached" means in the Vista Task
Manager for memory, but it appeared that we had no free memory. Office would
crash if we tried to do anything. Quitting Solidworks did not seem to free
up the memory. We had to reboot the PC. We have been trying to watch the
memory utilization, but it's tough for the users.

Grab our phone number off our website (www.bluco.com) and call me to chat -
I am interested in your interactions with SolidWorks - that was going to be
our next step.

Bill

 

[mindg4m3]

We are having the same problem as well.

User is Local Admin
Symantec 11
Office 2007
Solidworks

We mostly notice the issue with Outlook.

Did you guys ever hear anything from solidworks about this? We calle
them and they said they were unfamiliar with the problem

 

[Bill Morgan]

We have not heard from SolidWorks on this particular issue. We have several
cases open with them about their 64-bit software, though. I have little
confidence in their support of the product, though, since after several days
of troubleshooting, their "senior" support engineer said "Well, I can't
duplicate this... maybe I should try it on a 64-bit system." Meaning he had
been trying to troubleshoot our 64-bit problem on a 32-bit system.

We have been forced to go back to a dual-PC setup, with the SolidWorks
running on a completely separate system. Painful, but still much better than
having Office crash constantly.

 

[dtaylor]

Hi,

We are having similar issues. Here's what's going on here:
-Open Solidworks
-Create a new Assembly
-Insert a part (insert component, drag/drop from explorer, feature
palette/design library)
-When we try to open a Microsoft Office via a shortcut it doesn't work.
-Outlook fails
-A logoff/login seems to fix it.

Our VAR said that Solidworks and Microsoft are aware and that Microsoft
is coming to Solidworks fix this...LOL...RRRRIIIIGGGGHHHTTT!!!!

Can you try to replicate this. This happens on all of our machines.

Thanks,

Derek

 

[Ken]

I manage two systems with your same configuration (SW2009, Vista-64, and
Office 2007). Both systems were randomly crashing Office application (XL,
Word, Outlook,…). Rebooting was a temporary fix. My V.A.R. had me removing
Office add-ins and performing repairs on Office to no avail. Then I stumbled
across this Service record in the SW Customer Portal “S-036457†It Seems
unrelated, but a quick regedit and the problem went away. Turns out the issue
is not a vista or office, but an Explorer 8 and 64bit windows OS.

 

[dtaylor]

Ken,

Thanks...but we don't have IE8 installed.

Derek

 

[Ken]

Derek, after reading your reply I checked and IE7 is what's installed on our
work stations. I made an assumption that IE8 is what came with Vista.
However, S-036475 has still seems to have fixed the Issue. I’ve not had any
Office related apps crash since making the change.
Best regards,

Ken

 

[lincolnmarkiv]

Hi guys,
pls contact your local SolidWorks support for help.
From today there is a hotfix available that fixes the above describe
issues.

The fix should solve these problems :
Microsoft Office 2007 crashing on Windows Vista x 64 with Solidwork
installed.
Randomly, not reproducable crashes occur in Excel 2007 , Outlook 200
and Word 2007

 

[ZaqHydN]

Please see this potential solution:

http://forums.techarena.in/office-setup/746793.ht