I don't know that this was necessarily the cause, but I just upgraded my rather old version of BOINC from 5.8.16 to 6.4.5, rebooted, and suddenly I'm having major problems with MS Office 2003 programs, most notably Excel & Word. (When starting Excel or Word, they come up and present their screens but then stop responding entirely to typing, mouse clicks, and even End Task.)

This sounds suspiciously like a DLL conflict problem to me, but I thought I'd check here to see if anyone's heard of anything like this. I'm running XP Home SP3.

Has anyone got any suggestions for me?

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Davin

Has anyone got any suggestions for me?

You should have remained with 5.x; 5.10.45 works fine for me. ;-)

Gruß,
Gundolf

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Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

Sorry... some of my projects started refusing to run on the old version.

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Davin

Unless you're running (or attempting to run), CUDA apps on your graphics card, then stick to 6.2.19, which is the last version that works without a lot of side effects.

Sorry... some of my projects started refusing to run on the old version.

Which projects? Just curious.

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Kathryn :o)

I'm not running CUDA, but if something has already corrupted my system will going back to an earlier version now repair it? I wouldn't expect it to down-level some common DLL just because I down-leveled one piece of software.

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Davin

I *think* maybe Seti was the one I noticed complaining, but I'm not sure any more and my log files got recycled many restarts ago.

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Davin

Un-installing the current version, and then re-installing an earlier version is 'built-in' to version 6. You can even go all the way back to version 5 if needed.
This WON'T help if one of the auxiliary files is corrupt, such as the accounts files, etc, but client_state.xml will get re-created if it's gone bad.

SETI is, perhaps, THE project for causing problems with CUDA enabled versions of BOINC.

Old messages are archived in stdoutdae.txt, which is in the BOINC folder. There are several of these; stderrdae.txt for instance has a list of just errors.

I *think* maybe Seti was the one I noticed complaining, but I'm not sure any more and my log files got recycled many restarts ago.

Yes, it was; but only because someone has screwed up the scheduler code. See my message at their "Questions and Answers/Web site" board.

Gruß,
Gundolf

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Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

Hey! I think that fixed it!

I downgraded to 6.2 and got it running normally again, so I re-tested Excel. It locked up after initialization just like before, and I was quite disappointed. But after about a minute, to my surprise, it suddenly started working again. Now it's behaving just fine, responding just like it always has.

So I'd say that a link to 6.4 is reasonably confirmed and somebody should be keeping an eye out for that rather obnoxious interference with other applications. Perhaps I have hardware that new CUDA code recognizes but that it can't use properly and it hangs up anything related to fancy capabilities of the GPU?

Thanks to everyone for help on this issue!

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Davin