Home → Troubleshooting → All Products: Other Issues → Intermittent Errors in Excel 2013 or 2016
I'm getting strange errors in @RISK, but only intermittently. For instance, I might get this popup:
The library survival mutex has not been set for this process.
Or maybe @RISK opens up and instead of a blank workbook there's just a gray background.
Or everything seems normal, but when I click Start Simulation the results window is blank.
Or the Browse Results window is just a white rectangle in the corner of a gray background.
What is going on?
If you're running Palisade software 7.0 or older in Excel 2013 or 2016, the most likely cause is an Excel setting. (This is not an issue with Palisade software versions 7.5 and newer.) Click File » Options » General and look at the last option, "Show the Start screen when this application starts". With that option checked, there may be an intermittent conflict with another add-in, such as Solver, when Excel starts up. Such a conflict can have consequences at any point in the whole Excel session, not just the errors mentioned above but almost anything unexpected. To solve the problem, remove the tick mark for the last option, then close and reopen Excel.
If you have an earlier version of Excel, or if the above doesn't cure the problem, try restarting Windows (not just logging off and on). This was the solution for our few pre-Excel-2013 users who got the "library survival mutex" message.
Last edited: 2017-02-02