Office 2007 hangs... Or is it Vista?

[R. Relph]

Brand new Lenovo T61p notebook (T7700, 4GB, 200GB, Vista Ultimate), both "as
delivered" from Lenovo and with a "Vista only" install of the OS, all
updates, followed by installing Office 2007 Professional, with all of it's
updates. Some minimal "extra" stuff - fingerprint reader driver, Intel Turbo
Memory driver, Intel ABGN Wifi driver. All seems well... Typing away in Word,
Outlook running... Then "not responding". Switch to Outlook. Send/Receive 66%
complete (wierd number with only 1 account configured...), then it stops
responding, too. 3-finger salute, task manager, ... well, it's icon showed up
in the system tray, but no other indication it's there. The icon shows
minimal CPU usage. The "auto-hide" task bar still does it's thing. Let it sit
for 10 minutes... No changes.

What gives? No diagnostics report any problems. I've done 3 re-installs of
the OS now and each time my sense is the machine isn't "stable" and I do it
again. But this time, I'm pretty convinced the problem is deeper, and much
more persistent.

 

[jimmuh]

There are, of course, many possibilities. On healthy hardware I have
personally seen this behavior under Vista on two systems. In both cases it
turned out to be the antivirus software (CA and Symantec). Can you disable
your antivirus software (and any third party firewall, if you are using such)
just to see if the behavior persists?

Bear in mind that some antivirus / firewall software is pretty hard to get
completely disabled without uninstalling it.

Bad drivers and bad hardware are always suspect for strange flakiness of
this sort, too.

 

[R. Relph]

The "as shipped" configuration had Norton/Symantec AV. For the "MS-only"
config, I used McAfee from Comcast - my ISP. All the drivers are signed.

I've rebuilt the machine again... So far, it is behaving this time, but I'm
still very concerned. I can't really USE this extremely limited test
environment - I have to have some more drivers installed for the machine to
be useful.

I should note that when Office "hangs", recovering inevitably involved
powering off the machine. NOT a comforting event. Worse, though between BIOS
and Windows I get the "unexpected shutdown detected" screen, there's no log
of it in the Problems and Solutions anywhere. It seems that Windows is taking
some steps to figure out what went wrong, but I'm clueless as to where to
look for that information...

If there are other ideas, please share...

Thanks,
Richard

 

[jimmuh]

I'm afraid it's a process of elimination, and that can be very time-consuming
and frustrating. It helps if the non-responsive status is easily and
consistently reproducible. I stand by my suggestion that you try disabling
the anti-virus software (or removing it altogether) to see if the behavior
persists. If the behavior goes away with the AV software gone, then find
other AV software. Both McAfee and Symantec are, imho, just horrible
software. I just had to take an entire production network away from Symantec
antivirus (the corporate edition) to Eset's NOD32.

You also haven't said whether or not you are using a third party firewall.

There are truly so many, many possibilities that just hip-shooting on a
message thread is unlikely to get you anywhere. I only took a shot in the
dark because the particular symptom of a system becoming unresponsive in a
particular way -- mouse and keyboard work just fine, but applications stop
responding -- is something I've seen (so far) from only one cause in Vista.
It has always been antivirus.

That is not to say that other components of the system might not have come
into play. It is entirely possible that, in the cases I saw, the antivirus
software was conflicting with another software or hardware driver component
of the system.

In the end, you can start with a clean system with nothing but the OS and
Office on it (being VERY careful, of course, about any Internet or e-mail
connections until such time as you have antivirus software installed). Test
it. No problem? Proceed with installation of antivirus. Test. No problem?
Proceed with installation of another piece of hardware or software, then
test, etc.

One step at a time is the way to nail the culprit. But, yes, if the problem
is inconsistent about showing up, this method can lead to insanity. I hate
intermittent failures.