On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:39:20 -0700 (PDT), Harlan Grove <hrlngrv@gmail.com>
wrote:

>What other software is running on these users' machines when these
>problems occur? It's possible it's a resource issue, and there may be
>some service or application with a memory bug that slowly but surely
>consuming ever more memory even if it's not the foreground task. Have
>these users run Task Manager just after this problem occurs and check
>system resources.
>
>Also, video may be a problem. Even though these are new machines,
>check for newer video and printer drivers.

I suspect you are correct about the video. Although I've got the latest
drivers, and also made some minor changes in certain settings suggested by
others, the problem persists, although it seems less frequent.

The problem will also occur when booting into a mode where msconfig has been
used to disable everything except Microsoft services. So I do not think it is
an interfering, non-office program.

It occurs after some variable period of time. On this machine, it will occur
more quickly with the program open but blank, than with a worksheet present.
Some of the characteristics are that the ribbon may be missing or "fractured",
the menu bar may or may not be present. Different components may be drawn in
different places on the screen. Occasionally there will be a message about
insufficient resource to perform the operation (and that message box will be
incompletely displayed). On the task bar, right-clicking the program icon
brings up a box filled with black (my normal is white). As I move the cursor
within that small box, the different lines (maximize, restore, close, etc)
appear in "reversed print" (i.e. white on black).

There are some who think a common denominator is dual monitors. I'm not
convinced but my machine here is a dual monitor machine. At another home, I
have Excel 2007 on a single monitor machine, but I've not used that long enough
to definitely state whether this video disruption is a problem there, too.

Both of my video cards are NVidia based. Both of my CPU's are Intel.

If the problem does not occur on my other machine, it may lend some credence to
the dual monitor being an issue. But it'll be six months or so before I'll be
able to test that hypothesis.

Machine with dual monitors:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe 2.66GHz
EVGA 256-P2-N554-AX GeForce 7600GT 256MB

Machine with the single monitor:

Intel Pentium D 950 Presler 3.4GHz (also a dual core)
EVGA 512-P2-N570-AX GeForce 7900GTX 512MB

Both machines have Intel Motherboards, 2GB RAM, Windows XP SP2; and both the
motherboards and video cards are at the default settings except for one bios
tweak on this dual monitor machine (increasing PCI Latency to 128) that seemed
to decrease the frequency of this corruption.

Any other thoughts, Harlan?
--ron