I am using JAWS 11 on a Dell laptop, running Vista The problem began when we did some things to try to speed up a sluggish computer. When JAWS is running, I cannot start MS Word or Excell. I can start JAWS after MS Word is running, and it works, but I cannot use Excell at all. Other Office programs run fine: IE, Outlook The error message says Windows is looking online for a solution, but then I get no answer, just the option to close the program I did a repair on JAWS with no success. I tried a system restore, but that did not help. MS office was updated during the earlier process, so it is current. Below is a list of things we did during the process of trying to improve computer performance. Maybe that will give you an idea of something we can do. Perhaps the final solution will be to reinstall MS Office, but I am hoping someone might have a better idea before I go to that option.
Here is the list of things I did as I tried to increase computer performance: 1) Disabled almost all plug ins in Internet Explorer except plug ins by Microsoft or Adobe. 2) Ran Microsoft update. There were no critical or hardware updates. Also updated MS Office. 3) Defragmented the hard drive. 4) Updated the anti-virus database. 5) Uninstalled various programs including, but not limited to: Google Desktop, everything by Google except Google Earth. 6) Viewed startup items, in particular items initiated by Windows registry keys. Unchecked a few items I'm pretty sure I unchecked Windows Media Player if it was on the list. There was an HP web printing program I disabled or uninstalled. 7) In one of the configuration windows concerning bootup, it was configured to do a special boot process. I changed it to a "Normal" boot process, but I later noticed it had gone back to a previous value. I'm not sure what that was all about. 8) I changed performance settings from "automatic" to "optimized for performance." This removed many special effects about window shading, button styles, etc. The environment appeared more similar to older versions of Windows. 9) Went into the C drive properties, unchecked the box that said something like "index for faster searching", and I instructed it to apply the settings to all subfolders and files. I went into the Indexing control panel menu and limited indexing to the fewest possible files. I also explicitly removed indexing for files with extensions .pst, .psm, and .xml. After this change, Outlook provided a warning saying that the indexing was not being run against outlook. I acknowledged the warning and instructed Outlook not to produce the warning again. 10) I disabled the Indexing service. 11) Installed the newest Adobe Reader. I didn't explicitly uninstall the previous one, so I hope the installer was smart enough not to mess that up. When I started, the laptop had instability issues with Internet Explorer, ran slower than I would have expected, and occasionally the explorer.exe process would lock up when you try to click on the Start menu. It would take a full minute or two before the start menu would start working again. The hard drive access light appeared to be unusually active during this period of time. The most effective changes may have been: disabling Internet Explorer add-ons; uninstalling Google Desktop (it performs a duplicate service to Windows Indexing), disabling the fancy Vista graphics, and disabling Indexing. I don't know how much Indexing really affected the performance, but I didn't like a laptop randomly accessing the hard drive beyond normal usage. However, it is enabled, it probably won't slow things down much. Without knowing exactly how JAWS works, I suspect the following changes are the most likely to have caused trouble, starting with the most likely: 1) I might have accidentally uninstalled or disabled startup of a program that JAWS relied on (possibly due to conditions previously unknown). 2) When I upgraded MS Office, that broke the interaction with JAWS 3) By changing the Vista graphics, I broke the interface between JAWS and the windows graphics. 4) By uninstalling programs, a random file was changed or deleted, possibly a dll. Google Desktop may have touched files somewhat deep in Windows. Shortly before I left, I started to take special note of a process that had the name "proxy." I believe that the process was executed by JAWS, but after JAWS exits, the proxy continues to run. As a guess, I suspect that it might act as a proxy to standard windows library API calls, allowing JAWS to do what it needs to do. I would not be surprised if it is extremely difficult or impossible to safely end this process, which may be why JAWS leaves it running. Every time I saw the minute or two delay for the start menu to appear, I believe this process was running. Therefore, for the best performance, it may be necessary to reboot the laptop every time JAWS is closed. There are a ton of programs that run on startup. Most of them don't do much other than try to check for software updates, but I doubt that all of them are necessary. ____________________________________________________________ Home Improvement Projects Click here to find experienced pros to help with your home improvement project. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/c?cp=9OX0AZFug2171WeYltW4vAAAJ1AXVFQxfSTRK35KOFGG_8t-AAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAShAAAAAA= For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
