PowerPoint 2013: Images in presentation disappear - and are replaced with 'The image part with relationship ID rId2 was not found in the file'

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the information.  I am still struggling to locate a proper temp file.  the ~$TEST.PPTX file is usually only around 1K, which seems much too small to hold anything.  Only the crash recovery can be found in the ~temp directory.

It is certainly locking the .pptx file (or more likely some of the files that it contains).  I experienced a recurrence of this problem today while editing a brand new single-slide file with only text!

I'm going to go through all processes and close all windows once again (though have done it fairly thorougly previously) to see if I can eradicate the problem) and might even try Safe Mode.

Kind regards

--

Ronnie

The only saving grace is that I also saved it as a PDF, so re-creating my work is a tiny bit easier, and I can cut and paste some of the text from the failed presentation into the one I am having to re-create. This is a frustrating way to waste a Sunday afternoon.

In the dozens of times this failure occurred with me I never lost any text. Only images were affected. The first time it happened with me was a deck with 70 something slides with all but a couple having images or multiple of images. It took me a couple of hours to get back where I was. What I discovered is all the image placeholders were there with the RED X and all I had to do was right click the frame select "CHANGE IMAGE" and reinsert the image from the file. It was a pain in the ****, but it did get me back where I was pretty quickly. I made it a point to save very often so if it did fail in the update procedure, I could always drop back to the previous save and not lose all my rework to that point. Good luck with that. MM

So I just had this happen to a file I've been working on this afternoon. I thought I'd gotten around the issue by putting CrashPlan to sleep while working on a file, but I had done that this time, and boom - once again, all of the photos in my client's 82-slide program (except a couple of the newest images per the comment above) are gone. 

I tried saving a couple of different ways once I realized what was happening - saved the file to another computer on my network, saved it down to 97-2003 - but those did not work, either. The only saving grace is that I also saved it as a PDF, so re-creating my work is a tiny bit easier, and I can cut and paste some of the text from the failed presentation into the one I am having to re-create. This is a frustrating way to waste a Sunday afternoon.

Now I'm really upset. I have a very important presentation to do for a large new client this week, and my previous method of getting around this issue may or may not keep me from having to re-do a huge amount of work for a VIP client.

>> It appears to be an issue with images being locked by some program or other.  What I don't get is why you get the 'cannot open' error immediately before the 'cannot save' error. 

Does Powerpoint unzip the files while working on them to a different / hidden directory which is subject to further monitoring?

It does write either to the temp directory or (more normally, I think) to the same folder as the file you've just opened is in.  

For example, if you open TEST.PPTX, PPT creates a hidden ~$TEST.PPTX file in the same folder.  It holds both files open.  If some other program is monitoring changes to the folder, it might try to lock one or both files, which can cause PPT to flip out.

It might be worth looking through the process list to see if ANYTHING's there that might be monitoring file opens/saves/changes.  And another thought:  I wonder if Outlook's Journaling feature might be sticking its nose into things.  You might want to verify that journaling is off, at least for a test, and it'd be worth quitting Outlook as well.

And more basically, if you have Windows Explorer set to show a preview pane and a PPT file is being previewed, then the file's likely open, which can also trigger PPTSnits