System Tray - strange behaviour with empty Excel

[Bill Hamilton]

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is an Excel question or a Windows question, but as it undoubtedly has an Excel aspect, I'll try it here first. I'm running Windows Home SP3 and Excel 2007 SP1 on a 2Mhz HP desktop with 1Gb memory.

I finish working on a workbook and close it, leaving Excel running with nothing loaded (completely blank, not with a blank workbook). If I leave it in that state then after a minute or two, if I hit the < to expand the System Tray, it takes a little longer to come out than usual. Normally it shoots in and out more or less instantly. Then, the longer Excel stays running empty, the longer the tray takes to expand (and contract, it's just the same both ways). There are normally about 20 icons in my tray, and after a while it can take forever to expand. After 15 minutes just now it took about 10 seconds. If I open a workbook, this symptom persists.

While it is expanding/contracting nothing else can be done - open/close/resize a window, start an application, even hitting the Start button does nothing and the Task Manager stops. Everything starts up again when the expansion/contraction has finished. I guess that might be a Windows constraint although it might also be that the cpu has gone to 100% while processing the tray. Hard to tell as the Task Manager freezes while it's moving, but I occasionally see it at 100% momentarily exactly at the moment when the tray movement finishes (and it wasn't before it started). I have the TM refreshing at 1sec intervals, so it's a chance timing thing.

As soon as I close the Excel instance, everything goes back to normal. The system tray can immediately flash in and out as usual.

While Excel is running like this it is using cpu, and this increases as time goes on up to a max of about 5-5%, although I did see 8% momentarily once. Quite a lot for something which is theoretically doing nothing.

This isn't exactly a showstopper, but I'm just curious to know if anyone has any idea what's going on, or even seen this before.

Bill

 

[RoryA]

I'm running Windows Home SP3 and Excel 2007 SP1 on a 2Mhz HP desktop with 1Gb memory.

Perhaps a 2GHz processor would help?

Does it make any difference if you start Excel in Safe mode (hold down Ctrl key while opening Excel normally, and answer Yes to the prompt)?

 

[Bill Hamilton]

Perhaps a 2GHz processor would help?

OK, smarty, you've never done a typo?

Good question, though, and no it doesn't seem to do this in safe mode. I ran it for a couple of hours and everything was normal. I then restarted Excel normally, closed the active book it starts up with and only after 5 minutes the slow tray effect started. Its cpu is going at 2-5% all the time and I can almost count the icons appearing as the tray expands.

What's Excel actually working on here? It's supposed to be playing dead.

 

[RoryA]

Can you try running Excel normally, disabling any add-ins you have loaded, then restarting Excel and see if the behaviour persists? It would appear something in your startup is causing the problem. Also, do you have an Office plug-in active in whatever anti-virus app you are running?

 

[Bill Hamilton]

The only add-in is the Google Desktop Addin (a COM addin, whatever that is). It seemed to get there all by itself somehow as Google Desktop was there before I installed Office 2007 (only recently acquired) and I have no idea what it's actually doing for me in Excel, but there you go.

Anyway, I disabled it and it made no difference to the system tray effect.

I use the plain-vanilla free AVG for my anti-virus, and as far as I know, it doesn't have any hooks into Excel.

Regards

 

[RoryA]

The Google desktop add-in is somewhat notorious for causing weird problems in Excel. Have you rebooted since you disabled it?

 

[Bill Hamilton]

Nope. Will do.

What's its purpose in Excel? As I said, I had no idea it was even there. It didn't show up in the Add-Ins ribbon tab (or whatever it's called).

 

[RoryA]

To the best of my knowledge it indexes your files as you work, which I suspect involves it reading them so that it can do content searches. That and Adobe's add-ins seem to be responsible for a lot of the startup problems that people have with Excel, particularly Excel 2007.

 

[Stormseed]

20 items loaded into memory for 1 GB of RAM - Good Lord !

Don't you think that 20 items shud be reduced to 4 to 5 items only ?

The description you provided indicates a clear memory issue with your computer. According to me that latency of the inactive system tray icons is due to an application as in Excel opens - since it is Excel 2003 - the memory allocated by the system to Excel for Calculation Dependency Limits would be 1 GB and hence you can imagine the problem here.

You can also try defragging your hard drives, cleaning up invalid registry entries and removing unnecessary items from the memory in the startup. Please note that not all the items which are loaded into the memory could be seen in the Startup folder on your computer's drive.

 

[RoryA]

If that were the case, why would starting Excel in safe mode make a difference?