fix OFFLB.EXE freezing computer

[TanZail]

I’m using Office 2007 on Vista Ultimate. Everything was working great until last week. Now whenever I work with any office programs, after few minutes my system get freez and nothing happens. This continued for few days later when it started freezing with office applications once I opened Task Manager by pressing ctrl+Alt+del. I found a service named OFFLB.EXE running and eating up enough resources. I simply right clicked and kill that process which made my Office return to working state.

Since then whenever my office gets freez I find this processes running in task manager everytime. I don’t know what it is and why does it appears, most of that why is it freezing up my system? Any help please?

[Vanilla]

OffLB.exe also known as the “Office Lifeboat” is a good thing which helps you close the freezed Office applications and saves your work on hard drive and then try to restart the app. You say your office freezes due to this, wrong. Actually this appears when your office freezes. Anyways, as per the cause of the problem I strongly guess there would be some third party Office add-in which is creating the problem.

Did you checked running Office in Safe mode? If not, please try it and see if your computer or any office application freezes. If not, that means the add-in is problem. Come back to normal mode, try checking every add-in and see which one is creating the problem. You will need to remove that particular add-on.

[Brandy]

I'm not sure what all the Office Lifeboat (OffLB.exe) watcher uses for criteria or timing to identify a problem. My understanding it that it's not something that can be customized, but you should be able to disable it as part of the install/configuration of Office, but it's part of the diagnostics capability.

[senorhus]

One more question - even after clearing the cache / temp files and / or clearing off the registry, this program is re-appearing. Does this mean that there is a serious error in any of the windows application?

[Dan Loughney]

I've discussed this same issue with MSFT Support and they have said that in Office 2007, the feature is not configurable and cannot be removed. They did suggest that the OFFLB.exe file (and one other supporting DLL) be removed, but it does come back the next time office diagnostics runs.

The painful thing for my firm is that OFFLB seems to attach itself to the process as if it were a debugger. This not only halts the process it is examining, but also momentarily pauses the entire PC as the OS has to do something, probably in the kernel, to facilitate this. Also with my firm, we have centralized Exchange servers so even running in Safe Mode, there are many times where just getting data from exchange is slow enough to start OFFLB.

We are investigating Office 2010 now. I'm hoping that OFFLB is gone, configurable, or removable. From my perspective, it really offers no value.

[GreatWhiteGeek]

Its still there, I'm fixing this very error on Office 2010 ProPlan Plus on XP SP3.

Troubleshooting malicious software. . . surprise, surprise.

Accidentally a Seducer- "He shot an empty word, Into the empty blue ; But on the way, it met A woman whom it slew. " -FN