Mouse clicks needed to keep downloads going: many readers confirm it; link to Word 98 seems likely

Last time, we described a problem where downloads (email or web page) would halt until you clicked the mouse. Then the download would proceed briefly and halt again, until you once more clicked the mouse. This would continue indefinitely until you quit most or all of your applications. In some cases, it was necessary to restart to get things working normally again. The problem occurs only intermittently (in my case, it has only happened two or three times in the last month). A reader suggested that having Microsoft Word 98 open at the same time as your Internet application was the precipitating cause.

This item apparently hit a nerve. More than three dozen readers wrote to say that they too have had avariation of this problem. Most could not offer any more information about a cause. They were just glad to discover that they were not alone with this bug.

Scott Boettcher noted that hitting the Return key may substitute for clicking the mouse as way to get a download to progress.

A couple of readers noted that this "freeze" could also happen with printing from a web page; for example, Chris Hagberg had to open the desktop printer window and keep clicking in it to get a print job to finish (quitting Word 98 eliminated the problem).

The majority of readers were convinced that the symptom was indeed linked to Word 98. Many also suggested that it may be limited to Mac OS 8.5.x. Jim Woodhill found that it happened most if Word 98 currently had an Untitled document open, although even this was not consistent. However, several readers have had this happen even though Word 98 was not open at the time; in some cases Word 98 was not even installed on their drive. And having Word open does not guarantee that the problem will occur. Two readers (Anice Hassim and Jim Royal) had the same symptoms, but linked it to having Outlook Exchange open; this led Jim to suggest that Microsoft's OLE software may be involved.

Marc Bizer notes that everytime the "freeze" has happened to him, MacsBug indicates that Word 98 was executing code. He suspects it is related to all the temporary Work files that Word creates.

Patrik Montgomery suggested an explanation for the problem (although it is still unclear what precipitates the symptoms): It starts when some interrupt process (perhaps some background task from Word 98) is halting the download. "Since clicking the mouse executes a very high priority interrupt, it overrides other interrupts already in effect. It seems the OS at this point allocates some processor time to the frontmost application, and when it has checked what you clicked on, sends an RFI (Return From Interrupt), which locks the machine again (it returns to the old interrupt, which really does nothing)."

Alan Applegate writes: "Microsoft Tech Support will tell you they are aware of the problem, but don't have a fix." The search for an exact cause and solution continues.

(Thanks also to Brian Tryon, Mark Stremler, Bill Cody, Ray Colley, C.R. Chilton, Carl Witthoft, Ryan McCullough and others.)