Open Office crashes, recovers, crashes again

Question

After completely reinstalling my laptop due to apparent registry corruption, I've encountered a problem with Open Office:

I open a simple Calc spreadsheet, it comes up normally, but then after anywhere from 5 seconds to several minutes (without even touching the Calc window) OO crashes, then comes up through recovery. If I let it "recover" it will do so and bring the spreadsheet up again, only to repeat the crash scenario again. If I kept clicking "OK" it would apparently do this all day.

I reinstalled OO once and the problem went away for awhile, but it came back. I then attempted to "reset" my profile (ie, rename the OO user directory in App Data), but OO crashed during the first startup after that, then resumed the original behavior.

If I open the same file using Excel it complains of errors in the file, and "recovers" them, but the "error report" it generates contains no details. If I save the "recovered" file then OO Calc will open it, but the problem returns after saving again.

Any ideas?

(The system is Vista SP2, running OO 3.4.1)

How to reproduce:

• Start Open Office Calc.
• Save workspace as "CrashTest.ods"
• From Task Manager kill Open Office (soffice.exe/bin -- one of each)
• Double click on the saved "CrashTest.ods" in Explorer.
• OO puts up a message that recovery will occur -- allow it.
• When the Calc window comes up, don't touch it -- just wait about 10 seconds.
• Calc window closes and OO puts up a message that recovery will occur -- from now on the sequence will repeat.

I suspect this behavior is limited to a few (recent) versions of OO, and very possibly only Calc.

Reported as Open Office Bug 1211094.

Sigh!! As much as it irritates me, I'm having to switch over to Excel for several things I used to do with Calc. Excel has a miserable UI, but at least it says up for longer than 10 seconds.

Solution

I have solved this crashing problem on my computer quite simply. Tools / Options / Internet / Proxy server set to NONE (it was System) Not a single crash since then in any OO document.

Windows 7 Professional OO Version 3.4.1

I don't know why, but it worked for me. I used to have multiple crashes every time I opened a document.

Comments

[ganesh]

I had s similar problem which got solved (twice) by using 'save as' in the few seconds before crashed again. Worth trying.

[Daniel R Hicks]

@alhalama - Bug report submitted.

[Steve]

I wonder, does it still crash if you have autosave switched on?

[Daniel R Hicks]

Update. It still crashes. I've given up on Open Office.

[Daniel R Hicks]

No dice. Crashed on an empty spreadsheet.