When starting Office 97 apps the app hangs. After awhile the splash screen shows, later the menu bars, and finally the whole app. If a file is opened, either locally or across a network, the response is very slow. Mostly Excel. Sometimes a reboot will fix the problem but not always. What does fix the problem is if I start all four apps, Excel,Word,Access,and Powerpoint. I then do a CtrlAltDel and choose shutdown/restart. Screens start flashing and finally on the Access screen I get a warning about not being able to continue or something and I close that screen. This keeps the computer from shuting down/restarting. I can then open any of the apps and they perform perfectly. Does anyone know what is happening when I do this process so I can just do the part that fixes the hanging app problem without starting up all the apps and then forcing a shutdown. This situation is happening on both the SR-1 and SR-2 versions of Office 97. Thanks in advance.

i'd uninstall and re-install on the 1st instance... then scan your hard disk for corruption and viruses...

When the problem originally started happening that is what I did, uninstalled and reinstalled on the problem computer. The problem did not go away. In the past it was 1 or 2 computers that had the problem, figured it was some kind of driver/hardware/software/memory combo that was causing the problem and just let it go. Now almost every computer using Office 97 has the problem and it seems to have started happening after the last few Microsoft updates were installed. Deleting the contents from the %system%/temp folder didn't help as suggested from other forums.

Microsoft often makes mistakes even with it's updates that are supposed to fix problems (LOL) uninstall it and reinstall it, running some kind of registry and temp file cleaner in between i suggest this cleaner: ccleaner.com older technology is the s---; keep it running