Instant XP lock up exiting Excel 2007...

Instant XP lock up exiting Excel 2007... (problem fixed)

This is the first time I have a real strange issue which I can't at this stage put on Microsoft or Parallels. I just installed Microsoft Excel 2007 (and only that) in my Win XP SP2 VM. All looked good and okay, including starting Excel, playing a bit with it, and then simply exit Excel and bang! Game over. The VM looks and feels unresponsive. Frozen. No reaction from keyboard, no reaction from mouse clicks. The screen looks frozen too : nothing react on mouse over. I can perfectly switch the screen to coherence, windowed, full screen and back, no problem, except that the VM does not resize itself (probably as it is frozen).

On the Mac side I can see one of the cores stuck to 80 - 90%, sign that the VM is actually running in a loop, I should say stuck in a loop.

Maybe this is a pure Excel 2007 bug that happen to perturbate Windows XP, maybe this has links to running it in the VM, I don't know.

I will most probably uninstall that Microsoft application, if I can't find a workaround. Though if someone has seen some similar issue, let's share experiences.

 

I have some more information: it looks even more odd now. I thought I had "played a bit with it" before exiting and experiencing the hang. In fact, I can play with it as long as I want, provided I don't TYPE in anything with the keyboard. Click a cel and type 'A' : game over, just like when I choose to properly Exit the application.

What's more... I uninstalled Excell 2007 and installed Excel 2003 : SAME ISSUE !!! I uninstalled Excell 2003, re-installed Excel 2007 : and still same issue. Though this XP-SP2 VM is used for heavy tasks of all sorts for months without a single real issue. And even now, **ONLY** Microsoft Excel 2007 OR 2003 exhibits this behaviour. Even Visual Studio 2005 (which I use daily and depend on - which is not the case of Microsoft Office), still runs smoothly. If it wasn't for having tried Excel 2007 today I wouldn't even know such a strange problem could occur.

Ok, does this look familiar to someone ?

 

Got news on this one!...
As I couldn't isolate anything clearly wrong, I started building a new Windows XP VM from scratch, using the very same XP/SP2, installing all updates, the same Excel 2007, some other softwares too... And all is well for now, I do not see any weird behaviour of any kind. I'm crossing finger though because the last piece of software I have to re-install is a big one and one I depend on : Visual Studio 2005. I really hope the problem wasn't between MSVC8 and Excel12... I'll post final result soon.

 

No need for a fresh new install... (Well at least it helped isolate the culprit). The problem is keyboard map related!! Yeah. As soon as I switch on one keyboard mapping made using the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator tool, Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 instantly freeze Windows XP upon typing in a cell or simply exiting the application.

I found another tool, a shareware, www.kbdedit.com, and the layouts built by this tool do not exhibit the same incompatibilities with Office. Problem fixed.

On a real PC where I tested this combination of keyboard driver and Office, I experience a huge peak in CPU charge for close to 30 seconds then it ends with an Office crash. In the VM it looks like this translated in a 'forever' loop, with 'forever' defined as at least 5 minutes, the most time I dare to wait when I was testing the issue.

So this WAS not a Parallels problem. Just a problem induced by the need to use updated keyboard layouts (because for us non US-qwerty users there is no relation between the way non ascii characters are composed on a given national Apple keyboard and the corresponding national PC keyboard), and somewhat aggravated in its effects within a virtual machine.

I feel good!