Office 97: Excel Spontaneous Reboot Problem

[strick1029]

I have a user in another department that says his machine spontaneously reboots after working in Microsoft Excel 97 for approximately 5 minutes. There are 7 other computers (all identical to his) running Office 97 in the same department that do not experience this problem. We've removed and re-installed Office 97, but this had no effect.
Thank you in advance for your replies.

[bgraham]

What OS are you using?
Have you looked in the log files in Win2K or XP if you are running these OS's.
How is the system properties/Advanced/Start up and recovery set?

[LindaHewitt]

Have you looked in the event viewer? This sounds more like the behavior of a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). BSOD's can be caused by malfunctioning hardware, OS or application software problems. Typically, this is caused by programming code problems in a software application. Sometimes it is caused by a poorly written dll on a new hardware component such as a printer.

Has the user downloaded or installed any new software? Have any hardware components been replaced? Does this user have any new hardware such as a printer or a scanner that the other systems do not have?

Suggestion:

Once you have the system fixed, then I would recommend that you install PowerQuest's V2i Protector, Version. This software is produced in a desktop edition and an enterprise edition. You will need to decide which edition best suits your environment.

If users are allowed to download software updates or to install software, then each user should be required to keep a log of every instance of a d/l or software update or new installation. In addition, each user should be required to do an incremental backup onto a separate drive or partition.

Or this process can be managed and controlled at the enterprise level using V2i Protector, Enterprise Edition. A log would still need to be maintained.

Cheers,

Linda

[strick1029]

This machine is using Windows 98SE. No new software has been installed since the machine was deployed about 2 years ago. No hardware has been replaced, nor have we had any harware problems.
The reboot problem only occurres in Excel, and does not happen in any other applications.
Thank you for your suggestions. I appreciate all your assistance.

[strick1029]

Also, the machine just reboots on it's own. No BSOD's or anything of that nature.

[LindaHewitt]

Six months after buying a Dell Optiplex GX400 desktop, W2K, I started experiencing this problem of my computer rebooting itself on a random basis. Dell said that the fix was reinstalling the OS, Microsoft said on their website that 99% of the time, this problem is caused by malfunctioning hardware.

I didn't want to reinstall the OS because I would have lost all of my OE files as well as software which had been downloaded from the internet. All of my troubleshooting efforts came up empty. All of Dell's recommendations also came up empty.

After 8 months, I hired a hardware - W2K system guru. We double and trible checked each hardware component and when all the hardware components were eliminated, he started checking software applications.

It turned out that the cause of the problem was AVG anti-virus freeware program.

What was causing the system to automatically reboot was that the programmer had not included code for what to do with every possible error code. When the program passed an "undefined" error code, it did not get processed. The next time that the program encounters another error, the program doesn't know what to do because the previous error had not been processed. Hence, the OS says "Kings X", reboot the system.

I also did not get the blue screen of death. I didn't discover that it was a BSOD until I started doing research on the internet using Google to expedite the efforts of my tech guru.

Linda