Access crashing

[mrhcarlin]

Hi,

 

 

We seem to be having an isolated issue with Access on a collection of machines (not all) where Access is not responding and crashes out. The said machines are lower spec than ones that are not crashing.

 

 

Can you tell me if you are aware of:

 

 

- best practices for running editing Access files across network shares?

- any best practice for configuring roaming / appdata profiles?

 

 

Some fault solving info:

 

 

- all types of machine are running Office 2013

- the drivers are all up to date

 

 

 

Cheers,

Matt

[mrnoisy]

Matt if you open task manager, don't do anything, close it, does it come back to life ?

[mrhcarlin]

Should have explained further:

 

This only happened yesterday during a Year 13 database exam, but I don't want it to happen again because there's three more of these exams. Probably about 10 students experienced the issue (all on the older, lower spec PCs).

 

Re your reply: task manager is disabled on student accounts (naturally).

 

I was more wondering if Access has issues reading from/writing to network shares (users areas on DCs), specifically if the connection were to drop momentarily or due to slow network interfaces. I just couldn't see why only the crap PCs were having issues beyond the network thing...a C2D with 2GB RAM should be plenty enough for Access on a 32bit OS.

 

If Access has no such issues, then it's certainly PC limited.

[mrnoisy]

We have been experiencing issues with Office 2013, word / excel / PowerPoint, basically stops responding when opening, opening network docs, email docs.

I've been investigating for a few days now as it was random, no errors other than generic event ID's 1002/1003 "application hang"

We initially went down the remove and reinstall route, but the issues arose again pretty quickly.

 

What I have found that seems to have cured the problem across all ms office products is to disable the graphics hardware acceleration within office, options menu, advanced options.

[mrhcarlin]

Cheers pal. I assume there's a GPO to disable that? Will implement on Monday if so.

[mrnoisy]

No GPO that I know of as of yet, they only way to do it is either

Manually (not so bad if it's only a few exam laptops )

Via the office 2013 SDK

Unfortunately you can't implement it on existing installs.

If you find a way to do it via GPO give me a shout as we need to do the entire school lol

[mrhcarlin]

Ah ok haha. I'll have a research then!

 

And yeah will do

[mikes]

this isn't so helpful but we have the exact same issue. It basically hangs as described. I think we tried disabling GPU acceleration without success, but I will check that Monday (might be confusing myself with photoshop). Also on Office 2013. We have tried both AppData on a folder redirected network share, we also made everyone's AppData local with no redirection and the exact same problem happened.

This is on C2D's with 2GB of RAM, it even happens on Core i5 with 4GB RAM and HD 4000 onboard, using the default MS VGA driver or the Intel one doesn't seem to make a difference.

I have wasted a lot of time diagnosing this, it looks like I will be doing some more on Monday.

[mrnoisy]

this isn't so helpful but we have the exact same issue. It basically hangs as described. I think we tried disabling GPU acceleration without success, but I will check that Monday (might be confusing myself with photoshop). Also on Office 2013. We have tried both AppData on a folder redirected network share, we also made everyone's AppData local with no redirection and the exact same problem happened.

This is on C2D's with 2GB of RAM, it even happens on Core i5 with 4GB RAM and HD 4000 onboard, using the default MS VGA driver or the Intel one doesn't seem to make a difference.

I have wasted a lot of time diagnosing this, it looks like I will be doing some more on Monday.

 

Not sure if you getting confused, you don't disable it on your hardware, you disable it within the office advanced settings.

Another area to check is any plugins.

[howartp]

Had one exam student doing probably the same IT exam this week (the 10 hour one?) and had various Access crashes over the course of the exam.

 

A profile-reset fixed it in the end for us.

 

Peter

[mrhcarlin]

There is a GPO to disable GPU acceleration: User Config > Admin Template > Office 2013 > Misc > Do not use hardware graphics acceleration. GPO works fine but I won't know if it has worked until those same PCs get heavy Access use again, and conveniently the Y13 database exam (part 2) for tomorrow has been scheduled in a different room with the same new PCs that worked without issues

[mrhcarlin]

So it happened again today. Even on the newer machines, so it can't be hardware related. It only happened with two students, though, and one said it might be something they're using in the DB.

 

After the exam finished I copied their DBs to my local drive (ruling out an issue with network shares) and eventually managed to replicate the issue. It was their queries. Running a query caused Access to freeze for 10-30 seconds before returning some form of result (appending tables or whatever it was). I'm not much of an Access guy, though, so this is pretty rudimentary as far as fault-solving goes. I've ruled out network performance and hardware, and I'm actually using 64-bit OS and Office on my PC compared to the student machines so reckon I can rule out software too. It has surely got to be the DB specifically? Is it just a case of students panicking that their Access has frozen, unaware that it's actually running the query in the background (however slowly it may be doing it) and is in fact perfectly normal behaviour for Access?

[mrhcarlin]

Thought I'd just update the thread saying this turned out to be a non-issue as the few students that it was happening to admitted to having written inefficient queries referencing too many tables or something, causing them to append too many records and just slowly the program down until the query finished.

 

So to anyone having the same issue: it may just be user inflicted!