HELP: MS Word causing lock ups, high cpu utilization and fluctuating temps!

[duuuma]

posting for a friend who has a Gigabyte GMAX (Northwood 1.6ghz / mobo:GA-8ILFL / chipset: Intel 845GL / ICH4 / 256mb Crucial pc2100 / Seagate 40gb Barracuda IV) with Win2k SP2.

His MS word was causing lock ups and other strange symptoms (high utilization and rising cpu temperatures). No other program in MS Office XP was doing it except Word though it seems.

He has very few programs running (only AIM and IE5.5 usually, systray is pretty much empty) and yet there're 29-32 processes running on task manager. I haven't taken a look at what's being ran though, but I think there's a slight chance of a virus(?) He tried getting all the MS Updates, but they did no good either.

I know it's kind of a vague description, but anyone might have a hunch where I can start looking to troubleshoot? Any help would be appreciated!

 

[chemicalplay]

no idea, could be a memory leak causing the CPU to go mad trying to fix itself.

Have you got an update for Word 2000? Is there andy information on the net about it? Maybe a compatibility problem, cos win 2000 isnt exactly compatible with other things. Try and upgrade to windows xp, word xp or whatever.

Can u be a bit more specific?

 

[duuuma]

thanks for the reply, I just happened to be writing more info in my edit. Just curious, what causes memory leaks?

 

[chemicalplay]

usually memory leaks are caused by bad programming, an overlooked compatibility issues, or simply some kind of F*** up in the software somewhere. You could try a reinstall maybe.

the other prcesses running shouldnt cause such a bad problem. Maybe there is a conflict with another piece of background software, and they both are trying to use the same resource e.g. memory location, swap file location.

it doesnt nessacarily mean that word is bad, it could be something else u r running.

look for anything unusual in the processes window, like a process u havent seen before.
(i had a bad problem where someone had remotely installed an ftp server software to my pc, allowing them to download from me, but it was hidden apart from an innocent looking process.)

if there are any unusal processes running, run virus scan, or search the hard drive for that process name and see where it is coming from.

 

[duuuma]

Thanks for the help...he's tried reinstalling MS Office XP, but no good either. I'm going to take a look at his list of processes running and see if anything looks suspcious. I had a situation similar to yours when someone loaded WinVNC on my mom's computer.

At the worst, he'll just reformat the partition with WinXP or Win2k again.

 

[subzeroice]

One of the updates from Microsoft is classified as a Health Risk. It increases CPU utilization. I have the same problem. Just saw a post about it at theregister and I am pretty sure that is the problem. Explorer (not IE) accounts for as much as 98% of the CPU utilization and slows everything else down when this happens and there are about 20 processes that run in a normal windows system so I would rule out that possibilty.