Vista - Office Not Responding After Sleep

Office 2000 works great from a clean boot or reboot, but I cannot use any Office program after coming back from sleep mode. Excel, Word, ect., they all freeze and go into NOT RESPONDING if I my computer was in sleep mode. I have even performed Office Repairs and it still hangs (until I reboot). I am not using any Add-ins or Macros, and no other program on my system has any problem with sleep mode. Running as administrator does not fix. Running in compatability mode does not fix.

Please don't tell me to upgrade because I have googled and found others have the same problem, even with Office '07. I would be mighty PO'ed if I spent over $100 for the latest and greatest in an attempt to fix just this, only to come out with the same problem. Please don't tell me to wipe my hard drive and re-install windows, that is not a solution I am willing to consider. And please don't tell me to install some free .org office clone, that is not a solution to my problem.

You certainly know what you DON'T want

Try updating your BIOS, your printer drivers (if any), and as many of the other drivers on your machine as you can think of: NIC, video, sound, anti-virus, 3rd-party firewalls... update them all, and keep testing in between updates.

Anything that fails only after power state transitions (resuming from sleep in this case) suggests that one or more drivers are not handling the transition as well as they should be, plus the BIOS might be at fault too.

Then again, Office 2000 really is old. You're right in saying that updating to Office 2K7 wouldn't be a guaranteed solution, but you're not doing yourself any favours with a suite that's almost a decade old.

I do appreciate your suggestions. I guess I'm wondering what hardware drivers have to do with the MS Office application not responding. EVERYTHING on this machine works great after coming out of sleep, it's only MS Office that craps out.

It's just an educated guess.

Apps themselves don't really have a clue about sleep and hibernation. It's suspended animation as far as apps are concerned. The underlying work involved in saving all that state and then resuming is left to the combination of the BIOS, the OS, and the various relevant drivers. Office just happens to be a relatively complex bunch of apps, so odds are good that if anything visible is not going to work afterwards, it's Office. Think about it - if every app had to individually be coded to know how to behave during power state transitions, it would be mayhem. Sleep would NEVER work properly, simply because of the 000s of apps on people's machines.

Otherwise, it might really be a bug in Office 2K but for your sake I hope not cos I don't think MS would be producing too many updates for it nowadays.

I had a similar problem once, although it's been awhile. If I remember right, I went in and changed my energy mode setting on all items to "never sleep", then did a reboot and didn't have any more problems with the Office program.

I was using XP at the time so it is probably a different solution.

I've just installed Office SP1a then SP3... I will run for a few days and see if it's resolved.

Test FAILED already. SP3 did not fix, program still not responding after sleep.