A
Alan Quirt
A week ago I had a really nasty crash while running Excel, almost like a
kernel panic except that there was no panic message. I reported it in
the Using Mac OS X Leopard forum at apple.com.
Had been running without a restart since installing 10.5.6. Woke up the
computer from sleep and plugged in my iPhone 3g (running 2.2). It had
apparently synched and was simply charging at the time of the crash (but
see below).
Several applications had been running since the day before, including
Entourage, Excel, and Word (all 2004, last updated a few months ago;
there is a new 11.5.0 update I have not installed). Had checked mail a
few minutes before with Entourage and it was hidden. Word was visible on
my external monitor (which has the menu bar), and I was actively using
Excel on the Macbook screen, editing a formula in a newly-added column.
A few keystrokes back Excel had lost keyboard focus (as happens every
five minutes or so, apparently a known problem for Rosetta) but as usual
clicking on the desktop and then in Excel brought it back.
Between two keystrokes, total crash. Both screens went pale blue with no
messages of any kind, and a few seconds later I found myself at the
startup login screen with the generic space background. Login completion
seemed faster than after a full restart. All applications were gone; I
checked with Activity Monitor and nothing was running except system
tasks and my login startup items. When I restarted Excel it loaded a
recovery file that was nearly current; I lost only a few minutes of work.
It's a very basic spreadsheet with no graphs, pivot tables, etc. Just 4
sheets of entered numbers, sums and differences.
The console log suggests that at about the time of the crash there was a
failed iPhone synch operation of some kind. Just after it was logged
(with a crash report sent automatically) there are a whole series of
termination messages (WindowServer event port death, and a whole series
of Exited: Terminated events for various applications.)
Today another user replied to my posting. He has recently had three
similar crashes, all while running Excel 2004.
I will happily supply any logs etc that could help track down this
problem. Just tell me where to find them. That may be complicated a bit
by the fact that there were no crash dialogs from either Excel or the OS.
kernel panic except that there was no panic message. I reported it in
the Using Mac OS X Leopard forum at apple.com.
Had been running without a restart since installing 10.5.6. Woke up the
computer from sleep and plugged in my iPhone 3g (running 2.2). It had
apparently synched and was simply charging at the time of the crash (but
see below).
Several applications had been running since the day before, including
Entourage, Excel, and Word (all 2004, last updated a few months ago;
there is a new 11.5.0 update I have not installed). Had checked mail a
few minutes before with Entourage and it was hidden. Word was visible on
my external monitor (which has the menu bar), and I was actively using
Excel on the Macbook screen, editing a formula in a newly-added column.
A few keystrokes back Excel had lost keyboard focus (as happens every
five minutes or so, apparently a known problem for Rosetta) but as usual
clicking on the desktop and then in Excel brought it back.
Between two keystrokes, total crash. Both screens went pale blue with no
messages of any kind, and a few seconds later I found myself at the
startup login screen with the generic space background. Login completion
seemed faster than after a full restart. All applications were gone; I
checked with Activity Monitor and nothing was running except system
tasks and my login startup items. When I restarted Excel it loaded a
recovery file that was nearly current; I lost only a few minutes of work.
It's a very basic spreadsheet with no graphs, pivot tables, etc. Just 4
sheets of entered numbers, sums and differences.
The console log suggests that at about the time of the crash there was a
failed iPhone synch operation of some kind. Just after it was logged
(with a crash report sent automatically) there are a whole series of
termination messages (WindowServer event port death, and a whole series
of Exited: Terminated events for various applications.)
Today another user replied to my posting. He has recently had three
similar crashes, all while running Excel 2004.
I will happily supply any logs etc that could help track down this
problem. Just tell me where to find them. That may be complicated a bit
by the fact that there were no crash dialogs from either Excel or the OS.