PPT97: Presentation Conference Fails Without Error

ID: Q190406

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft PowerPoint 97 for Windows

SYMPTOMS

If you try to set up a Presentation Conference, the conference might fail without any error messages. The audience members' computers may connect and the presentation may start, but the presenter computer shows this message:

   Connecting to audience machine(s). This may take a moment...

The only option is to click Cancel and stop the conference.

CAUSE

This behavior may occur if any of the following conditions is true:

The name of an audience member's computer or the presenter's computer is longer than fifteen characters or it contains uppercase characters, spaces, or special characters or symbols (such as,

$,@,#,!,^,&,*,<,>,?,_).

You are running a third-party TCP/IP protocol stack.
The presentation you are trying to conference is corrupted or damaged.
One of the audience computers may be out of disk space and may have stopped responding. This may cause the presenter's computer to stop responding as well.

RESOLUTION

Presentation Conference in PowerPoint 97 does function on a Novell Network running Netware IP.

If the computer name is longer than fifteen characters or contains any special characters or symbols, rename it so that it has fifteen or fewer characters and does not contain any spaces or capital letters.

If an audience member's computer is low on disk space, either free up some disk space on that computer, or do not include that computer in the conference.

To regain connection to some or all computers in the conference, you may have to reboot the presenter's computer as well.

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   ARTICLE-ID: Q189699
   TITLE     : PPT: Presentation Conference Fails with Errors

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

Additional query words: 8.00 ppt97 failure communicate netdde nt ethernet internet 3.12 3.11 3.22 4.0 4.1 vlm netx client ip 2.1 odi drivers 3.51 wsock32 dll caps

Keywords          : kbnetwork kbualink97 kbconf kbbuglist
Version           : WINDOWS:97
Platform          : WINDOWS
Hardware          : x86
Issue type        : kbbug
Solution Type     : kbnofix

Last Reviewed: November 22, 1998