Excel freezes when trying to open PowerPoint App

[Kelvin Stott]

Hi, I have a large VBA macro that creates a PowerPoint file, copying and pasting various tables and charts from Excel into slides. Most of the time the macro works perfectly fine, but occasionally it runs into a problem:

1. Occasionally the macro crashes and is forced to terminate for whatever reason, however this problem is rare and occurs only in special cases, so I can figure out why and fix it later.

2. Once the macro crashes as in 1 above, it stops working completely in ALL cases, even after I close or terminate Excel and PowerPoint, reopen the Excel file and try to run the macro again in cases where the bug in 1 above never occurs. Specifically, it freezes (without reporting any error) at the following line of code which otherwise never causes any problems:

Set ppApp = CreateObject("PowerPoint.Application")

I can only get the macro to work again if I restart the computer, so it seems that the first bug is causing some permanent change in the system memory or settings, which remains after Excel and PowerPoint are closed and is only reset by restarting the computer.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? Any ideas on what setting or other piece of information may be stored outside the Excel and Powerpoint applications to cause this problem? Is there any VBA code I could add to check and restore the correct default settings to make sure the above line of code works as it should in all cases?

I did spend a couple of hours searching the forums for any clues but could not find anything that helps.

Thanks for any help.