PowerPoint crashes while opening certain presentations

Problem

PowerPoint starts to open a particular presentation then crashes or becomes non-responsive.
Some versions of PowerPoint may be able to open the presentation without problems even though it crashes in other versions.

Solution

Opens in PPT 2003, Crashes 2002 and 2000, possibly 97
Look for CMYK images in the presentation; they can cause this problem. Specifically, we worked with a PPT user to narrow it down to this:

The images are generally made in different program and then imported to Adobe Illustrator for modification and finally saved as JPG. I changed the color format from CMYK to RGB and then the file worked!

Since you can't tell from within PPT whether an image was RGB or CMYK, you'll need to go back to the source image files to verify whether this is the problem. Using PPT2003's Save Image As feature, you could save the image as PNG or JPG, re-import it and delete the original. The presentation should then open in earlier versions of PowerPoint.

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