Excel spread sheet closes soon after opening

[tipple]

Bit of an odd one here...

What happens is, he navigates to his network drive and double clicks on a Excel file. Excel opens up on his second monitor and the spreadsheet loads up. All looks good but as soon as he moves his mouse over the open Excel window, Excel closes... No error message, it just closes. If he opens the file again and just waits without moving his mouse, Excel closes down again after about 10 seconds.
Was working fine about a week ago and he reckons it is happening with all Excel files on his network drive. He uses Excel 2003 and it runs on Windows XPP
Now the really strange thing is if he Emails the same Excel file to himself he can double click on the attachment in Outlook and it opens up Excel, loads the spreadsheet and he can work away on it as normal...? No issues....! If he saves the same attachment to My Documents say (still a network drive mind), he experiences the closing Excel spreadsheet issue again...?

So, what changes when you attach a excel file as opposed to just opening the stupid thing via a network drive...?
Any thoughts welcome

Cheers
Mike

 

[xlhelp]

I would suggest --- remove printer drivers completely and re-install.

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Finally....Done with 9 to 5

 

[zelgar]

I'm guessing that when he's opening the file from Outlook, a temporary file is being created on his PC's Hard Drive.

I would wonder if the same problem will occur if the file saved on the C: drive. If not, there may be some issues regarding write access or permissions to the network drive which may occur when Excel is trying to autocalculate when you move the cursor over the open excel file.

 

[Gammachaser]

I have encountered some very strange Office problems on LANs where having the Network IT folks reinstall the application has been the only answer. It sounds like this could be that type of problem, since it ws working fine and then mysteriously started misbehaving. Something gets corrupted by a network upgrade or maintenance procedure and sometimes the results are truly amazing. I once watched a Word Document spontaniously start adding pages to itself and before we could stop it the page count was in the thousands. I recently had to have Access reinstalled on my PC at work because it stopped behaving rationally. Code that worked one day would not work the next and I got error messages that were impossible on code that should have been fine. After reinstallation, no more problems.

Just a thought.

 

[tipple]

Thanks guys for all your input, much appreciated.

Tried deleting all the printers I could. (Some policy prevented me from removing all of them.) But we did blow away his default printer and then reinstalled it – No improvement. (Gave me an idea though. I’ll get back to that.)

He’s not permitted to save anything to his C drive but we did save to a USB stick. The same issue occurred opening an Excel file from the USB stick...

They had already tried re-installing Office before contacting us – Worth a thought though.


We noticed he could open up the Excel file without issue if you navigated to the file from within Excel. (As opposed to navigating via Windows Explorer – which is how it use to work) After a few more hours mucking around we settled on a workaround. The customer opens up Excel first thing in the morning. He then has to click on File and then Print and then close. (No document is ready to print but for some strange reason this process primes Excel for the rest of the day?) He can then double click on any Excel file via Windows Explorer as before and it open up fine. As long as he doesn’t close Excel it continues to work just peachy. If he does close Excel he just runs through the priming step again and away he goes. Not a definitive fix but certainly an economic one.

Thanks again guys for all your help
Cheers
Mike