Slide show?

Like others my slide show worked until today. The blank screen says "an error
is preventing slide show from playing. I have Vista Business, about 30
slides. What exactly do I do to make it work?

What slide show? Is this a PowerPoint presentation? If so, you'd be
much more likely to get the help you need if you would ask in an
Office/PowerPoint newsgroup than here in a Vista one.

the number and types of files can cause problems.

are they all the same file type.
try it with half as many and then add half the remaining back etc...

Mine too was working in Windows Vista Ultimate, and then a few days after the
upgrade, suddenly "stopped working" while displaying the error "an error is
preventing this slide show from playing".

I have installed windows vista at least twice, and the very same issue has
occurred both times.

It could be the slide show index is corrupted. The slide show has its own
tiny database and it seems to get corrupted occasionally. Fortunately it is
easy to delete and then slideshow resets to default values.

Instead of deleting you should be able to rename it and get the same effect
if you are worried. I have deleted mine several times without any problems,
but i don't guarantee anything ;-)

the file is C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo
Gallery\Pictures.pd4

Hope that helps!
Mark

Thanks for the information and suggestion. Unfortunately this did not work.
Interestingly enough, the slide show gadget works, as does the slide show
itself. Frustratingly it is the screen saver's slide show that nno longer
works.

On Sun, 15 Jul 2007 18:14:00 -0700, mwbjmb76@aol.com
<mwbjmb76@aol.com@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>
>
>"CJSM" wrote:
>
>> Like others my slide show worked until today. The blank screen says "an error
>> is preventing slide show from playing. I have Vista Business, about 30
>> slides. What exactly do I do to make it work?
>
>I have Vista Home Edition showing pictures form "My Pictures" folder. It has
>done the same thing. What's the fix?

None I know of. The trouble with most Microsoft software is not just
that it breaks down with alarming frequency but that rarely does it
give you a clue what happened. You can try sniffing around using Event
Viewer found in Control Panel under Administrative tools, but often
that is just a wild goose chase.

If you make a lot of slide shows you plan on keeping meaning you plan
on putting them on a CD or DVD do yourself a huge favor and buy a
third party application that does it way better and doesn't crash as
often as you change your socks.

I personally use Sony's Vegas. While a bit expensive, it's little
brother Home Studio. http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/default.asp
offers many of the same features at a reasonable price.

I have been struggling with this problem on 2 computers - on the 1st it
worked fine then stopped. I had copied my files from old to new computer -
and so on new computer it never worked, which led me to believe it was
something in the Pictures folder. By process of eliminiation I discovered
that I had several shortcut files in the pictures folder. If the shortcut
points to a valid location then there is no problem - but two of the
shortcuts pointed to invalid locations - and they were triggering the message
"an error is preventing the slideshow from playing".

I have a mix of video, jpg, tiff, gif, photoshop and other graphic files in
My Pictures and valid shortcut files are okay.

Hope this helps some of those still struggling with the problem.

error: An error is preventing this slide show from working & rating

I have slideshow only showing pictures with a rating. This stopped the error for me. Here's info on how to rate pictures

I had this problem and another, after failing to find a solution to this I
moved on to the next and it fixed both my problems. Problem I fixed was
Server Execution Faild, with a red "X" over the icon. This is what I
did....Simply run a command prompt as an administrator (right-click on it and
click "Open as Administrator") then enter the following command line:

net localgroup "Administrators" "NT Authority\Local Service" /add

I Found A Fix for "an error is preventing this slide show from playing" error in Vista. When you go into Personalization, open screen saver, select Photo. Then go down and click on "Change power settings..." Change to either Balanced or High Performance. You may also need to change jpeg image file size to around 500Kb per image. (I image there is a max size for the folder that you are using for you images, though I am uncertain what it might me). The power change worked for me and my photo screen saver is now working wonderfully.
Hope this works for all of you.
Kara

I Found A Fix for "an error is preventing this slide show from playing" error in Vista. When you go into Personalization, open screen saver, select Photo. Then go down and click on "Change power settings..." Change to either Balanced or High Performance. You may also need to change jpeg image file size to around 500Kb per image. (I image there is a max size for the folder that you are using for you images, though I am uncertain what it might me). The power change worked for me and my photo screen saver is now working wonderfully.
Hope this works for all of you.
Kara

Whooo-eee! Way to go. That worked for me. My issue was only when I used my
notebook on battery: then I couldn't get slide show to work from within a
folder or from the screensaver. I got that ubiquitous error. Mind you, now my
battery will drain super fast. But I'll only use the slide show feature when
I can access a power source fairly soon. Thanks very much for this, kcarmine.

And Brrnese, your point about valid shortcuts sounds like something to watch
for in future - thank you.

(Thought I'd submitted this, but that annoying survey screen thwarted me I
think....)

Kara, thanks for the idea about power: that worked for me, because my issue
was only when i was operating off battery on my notebook. And Kathie, I think
your shortcut point's a good one to watch for as well: thanks.

I had the same problem I just removed the "read only" attributes of the pictures folder I was using. Note that in my computer the folder is on a separate physical disk in my computer. Also, each one of the picture files I have is at least 12MB in size. I do not think that size matters.
I have not made any other changes to my computer and this worked.

regards
Z

Make sure you have not changed the location of the file with the pictures for the slide show. Also, I've had problems with files over 2-3 MB.