Hi,

We've got several worksheets here that make extensive use of the
bloomberg add-in. Some of these sheets are in excess of 10-15mb, and
have several worksheets in them gathering data from many different
sources.

Several of these workbooks are shared. We have been having
increasingly frequent problems with these books, very much in sync
with our upgrading of hardware for the machines they run on. The
faster the hardware, the more often we have lockups.

We have taken some of the sheets and pared down the calls to JUST
bloomberg, and we can get them to lock up fairly easily. When a
"frozen" excel session is viewed using WinDbg, we get some interesting
results:

1. Excel is spinning inside itself somewhere, performing the same loop
forever (about 5-10 lines disassembled)

2. At any time during a freeze there will be 4 bloomberg-related
threads, two of which will be in blpdatax somewhere, it looks like
they are waiting for data and two of which will be in the middle of
the bloomberg DLL DllUnregisterServer().

3. RPC is doing something, presumably the workbook sharing overhead.

Without fail, these threads will be there. Like I said, as our
machines get faster (a necessity) the problem gets worse. I think we
are seeing a very nasty race condition in the bloomberg excel / com /
dde stuff, but am not positive.

Has anyone else seen something similar to this?