PPT: PowerPoint Presentation Conferencing Fails

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's computer shows this message: The only option is to click Cancel and stop the conference.

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

• You are running the Presentation Conference on a Novell network with Internet Protocol (IP) as the default protocol, and you are using PowerPoint 95.
• 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.

Presentation Conference in PowerPoint 7.0 does not work on a Novell network, even with IP addressing. It is not compatible with any version of Novell NetWare, or or any third-party TCP/IP protocol stack. It functions properly only with Microsoft Windows 95 TCP/IP protocol.

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:

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