I'm a little late to the party, but I was intrigued by your son's idea to use ProcMon (Process Monitor). I'm using Win8.1 so it's not going to be identical, but I found all kinds of apparently worrisome results when running my copy of PD12. However I think this is a case of having too much information and not enough context.
When I opened up PD12 with an existing project, ProcMon generated
695,296 events in just 30 seconds!
That really is
TMI!
Most of the events that I scrolled through were marked SUCCESS, but there were plenty of others like BUFFER OVERFLOW, INVALID PARAMETER and NAME NOT FOUND. For that last one, it certainly looks bad that Windows and PD were looking for hundreds (or even 1000's) of specific registry keys and couldn't find them, but what that really means is that those registry keys have probably
intentionally NOT been set.
PD still has to check because it will do things differently if the keys are ever set, but it's an expected occurrence to see NAME NOT FOUND. Since PD
continually looks for some of the registry keys, ProcMon has to record (again) that the key wasn't found, which just adds to the impression that there are LOTS of problems when that isn't quite the case.
I guess my point here is that seeing even a large number of unsuccessful events in ProcMon does not
necessarily mean that something is terribly wrong with your installation, but something clearly isn't right if you don't even get a complete error message for why it can't import the .pptx file.
FWIW, I can successfully import either variety of PowerPoint slides, and the fact that you've uninstalled and reinstalled PD and Office without resolving the problem is worrying.
The best thing I can offer is to have you run "sfc /scannow" (without the quotes) from an elevated (Administrator level) command prompt. That's the best way for Windows to quickly check and repair any damage that might be lurking in the protected system files. We had one forum member who discovered that his Win7 install was badly damaged even though everything, except PD,
seemed to be working properly. With any luck, System File Scan may find and fix whatever's going on with your setup.
Good luck, and let us know how it goes
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Jun 09. 2014 23:28
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