Recently I seemed to have issues with opening PPT files. I am running Office 2007 for a long time now and one of the things that I use most with respect to my work is PowerPoint files. Over the last 2 weeks I saw a certain weird behaviour with PPTs specifically related to printer options.
Every time, I try to open the PPT or unlock the system with the PPTs open, they try to print to my default printer. The specific error message would state that the default printer could not be accessed. I dismissed them couple of times and thereafter, the PPTs start working normally.
However, I did realize that there is some issue somewhere. Today, any PPT I try to open was extremely slow. Initially I was opening them from a SharePoint portal, so thought, the issue must be with the network. But when I tried opening some local PPT files, they took similar time and were simply hanging.
Did some research and seems my initial suspicion was true. The printer driver was causing some concern here. I opened up the printers folder and tried to remove the printer. Now, the printer started giving “Printer cannot be removed. Access Denied” error message. The problem was getting interesting since I made sure that it is not the default printer and neither there are any pending print jobs.
In the end I re-installed the printer driver from the vendor website and post that, I could delete the printer.
After that, the PPTs started behaving normally. They were opening quickly and I didn't have any issue with PPTs after that.
I am still researching on what relation PPT has with printers to hook up automatically and would post once I find something significant. Meanwhile, if anyone is aware of it, please post in comments.
Cheers !!!