Hi there,

My PowerPoint presentation hangs when I try to load it. It loads about 55% and then says "contacting the server for information". It hangs, and eventually times out after 30 minutes. Version is Office 2010 Home and Business, SP1.



It does so on two computers (Vista 64 desktop and win7 laptop) and on two different versions of the document. Everything worked fine yesterday.


The document does have a theme/template, and it's saved in ppt 97-03 format. I'm suspecting the theme is not saved locally, and it's trying to grab something somewhere off of the web. I have other presentations without templates that load up just fine.

Please help! Thanks so much in advance.

I un-mothballed an old computer with PP 2000. The file loads, and everything looks okay. Everything works.

I tried stripping out the template, saving on a USB stick, then loading in PP 2010. Same problem: hangs, "contacting the server for information".

There's nothing else that's fancy in the file: just text and jpeg pictures. It's a large file: 220 slides.

Solved!

It turns out some of the images are OLE - they are linked to web pages. Turns out that one of the servers that is being linked to is down today.

I stripped out the offending images, saved, now PP 2010 is happy.

So... PP 2000 loads the presentation even though one OLE target is down, while PP 2010 completely hangs on the same thing! Unacceptable bug IMO.

I'm glad it happened today, and not on Monday when I'm teaching my short course to 43 paying clients. Yikes! It still ruined one of the nicest Saturdays this summer has brought me. Shame, Microsoft.