Excel doesn't play well with others

[somecallmetim]

Compaq Deskpoo P3-500, running W98 and Office 2000.

Everything was stable/lovely for many months. Suddenly yesterday the user gets a Fatal Exception error: OE at 015F-BFF9DBA7

The Office 2000 was the latest (SP1 included) and W98 was SE with all the latest patches.

I tried using the maintenance tool on the Office CD but the problem continues. Before the maintenance attempt the error message said the problem was with user.exe, after the maintenance attempt we get lock up or the occassional bsod with the above message.

Outlook, Word, and Powerpoint all work fine, as does all other software on the system.

Only Excel doesn't want to play nice... any ideas?

I suspected hardware (memory etc), but after Excel's antics, I'm assuming it's software related now.

SCMT

[blubomber]

Did you try installing SP2? I would try that first.

Have a good day!

[DVNT1]

I would first check a memory problem and check that with a good memory diagnostics tool (or swap memory modules as a test) since it is easy to do.

If a memory error is found and corrected, then repair/reinstall Office.


Outside of that, there is service pack 2 for Office which may or may not help.

[somecallmetim]

Quote:

Originally posted by blubomber
Did you try installing SP2? I would try that first.

Have a good day!

I ran office update and it said it was all up to date, so I guess SP2 is in there.

I've been suspecting memory, but only on one office app? I'm running memtest right now.

SCMT

[somecallmetim]

memtest ran through and everything came up Millhouse....

It could still be memory, but it appears that it isn't.

Any other ideas? Only Excel doesn't want to play nice - everything else is hunky dory.

I guess I'm reinstalling Office.

SCMT

[somecallmetim]

So I thought I'd be cunning and just take out Excel and reinstall it.

I log in and voila, Excel works fine.

I log out and let the user log in. Excel crashes (same user.exe error as before).

He logs out, I log in as admin and Excel works fine.

Doesn't W98 share user.exe across accounts? Why would it be all nasty on one and not on another?

Running the virus scanner on his system (again), but nothing came up last time.

Have I done enough isolation to call this a software problem or could this still be hardware?

SCMT ?

[DVNT1]

Software problem IMO.

Doe you have users profiles established? If so, I would delete that users account. I think there are less destructive means to do this but it's beyond me. I only use W2K with MS Office so profiles are done differently.

[somecallmetim]

Quote:

Originally posted by DVNT1
I would delete that users account... I only use W2K with MS Office so profiles are done differently.

Ah to use W2K in the office.... sigh.

Inspite of our luddite system your advice was EXCELlent (har har).

I deleted the user account and reinstalled it and he's up and running. Just his icons needed rearranging. I guess his user profile was corrupted somehow.

All is now good in the world.

Thanks for the help,

SCMT

ps: someone else mentioned using MSICUU.EXE. I didn't do it but (from what I understand) this would have provided a fix without deleting and reinstalling the user account.