Hi everyone,

Users at our office are running WordPerfect 9 (from the WordPerfect Office 2000 suite) as well as Outlook 2003, ProLaw 9.8.1.0, and often, Adobe Acrobat 7.0(.x). These four programs seem to have processes hanging around regularly for some users whenever they close prematurely, or possibly even when they are closed properly (I don't know this for certain, because I usually don't see how the app closes for the user--I just go to the user's desk after the fact and see extra instances running in their task list). Does anyone know where the problem lies, here, or how to avoid this without asking the user to constantly check their task list for processes that should be closed? I see it most on Windows 2000, but that's what most users are running.

Processes that hang open in the background regularly for us include:

Outlook.exe (MS Outlook 2003)
prolaw.exe (Thomson ProLaw 9.8.1.0 via MS SQL 2000 database)
wpwin9.exe (Corel WordPerfect 9)
pop90.exe (Corel PerfectPrint 9)
prwin9.exe (Corel Presentations 9)

In our situation fixing this is quite important. A strange conflict of some kind with WordPerfect/ProLaw/Outlook causes unexpected crashes with no backup file left behind by WordPerfect, which causes some users to lose hours of work. We find that opening WordPerfect the application first, and then opening a WordPerfect document through ProLaw (and not letting ProLaw force the WordPerfect application open) avoids this issue. However, there have been some WordPerfect crashes recently that occurred despite the workaround, and we think it's because extra instances of programs were open in the background; thus the user couldn't actually tell whether they had WordPerfect open first as they didn't go into their task list and end rogue processes (if that makes sense).

Thanks for your help.

I have a similar problem with Outlook on my Gateway laptop. Even if you close Outlook down properly, it sometimes continue to run in the background. In fact, we will notice that the computer runs slow, the fan running constantly and when you look at the "Processes" tab of the Windows Task Manager, Outlook will show 90 to 95% CPU utilization. Any suggestions?

Not sure, farmer41. Sorry I can't be of more help. I haven't noticed the CPU utilization for when Outlook hangs here.

As for our issue, we've got ProLaw support working with us on it, but no solutions yet. ACROBAT.exe sometimes hangs open after it should be closed and messes up Outlook until Acrobat is manually ended. Because Outlook interfaces with ProLaw, that can cause ProLaw to stop responding. Other times, OUTLOOK.exe hangs open and disallows ProLaw from closing until you kill Outlook. I haven't noticed patterns with when WordPerfect hangs up--just happens sometimes.

It could be software conflicts, as well. We have Office 97 (Word and Excel only) running alongside Outlook 2003 (from Office 2003), WordPerfect 9 (not the newest by far), and ProLaw as well. At least one user has experienced issues with the clipboard--maybe because it's Office 97 and 2003 sharing plus WordPerfect create clipboard weirdness...but I digress.

Do any of these applications launch on startup? It might be that these are constantly running in the background.
Regards,
John

Acrotray.exe (Acrobat helper) runs at startup. As I said, I don't see this one causing problems often. The others are user-initiated.