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

 

[riaz]

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.

Actually, AVG does have its hooks in the office suite. When you open Excel or Word or anything of that ilk, and also when you open files with those progs, do you see a little comment in the bottom left along the lines of "running virus scan" before the thing actually opens? (I can't tell you the exact phrase as I have disabled mine).

In the AVG paid version, there is an option to turn this off. In the free version, there is a tweak to turn it off, but I did this so long ago I forget how. I got mine by doing a search on google.

 

[Stormseed]

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

The OP can give a try. I never guaranteed that it will resolve the issue that he is experiencing just by implementing the above steps.

Practicality can be used sometimes with Windows unlike book knowledge.