Wednesday, March 30, 2005

PowerPoint crash when attempt to insert an image from the desktop

When I attempt to insert an image into a PowerPoint 2003 file and navigate to the desktop, PowerPoint crashes with this lovely message:
Runtime Error!

Program C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\POWERPNT.exe

This application has requested the runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.
A few google postings seem to point a finder at Adobe Acrobat and its infamous spyware like installation of an array of Office extensions.

This Acrobat article doesn't mention the bug but I'm going to try some of its suggestsions ... PDFMaker is unavailable in a Microsoft Office application (Acrobat 7.0 on Windows) - Support Knowledgebase.

I'll post an update when I figure this out.

Update: When I examine the Adobe certificate VeriSign certificate used by PPT it's listed as having expired over a year ago. Interesting.

Update: I rebooted and found that trying to open ANY file from the Desktop (ONLY the desktop) caused this error. This time I was asked to send a report to Microsoft, and on doing so was directed to a web form asking for my name and phone number. Curious! I also discovered that I'd somehow set my PPT open dialog box to the "Preview" mode. I switched it back to "Details" and the error went away. So it's something about the code used for "Preview" by Microsoft Office 2003. THAT makes me wonder not only about Acrobat, but also about Yahoo Desktop Search (YDS), a product licensed from X1 that includes a variety of file viewers. Sometime I'll look at my XP error logs ...

Update: I'm increasingly suspicious that this bug is from Yahoo Desktop Search and it manifests when using the preview mode of the Office 2003 open file dialog box. YDS is in beta and I checked the filename for the current download -- I'm many versions behind. I'll update.

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