<Note to self start>
This is a brief post and it is a message to my future self, should I ever find myself with a set of MXD files that just will not let me edit them without ArcMap repeatedly crashing.
The background is this: for a particular mapping project we have a nice map layout with logos and text and a legend (that’s another story). Recently I started to encounter a very serious problem, I’d start editing, you know the sort, zoom in click click click zoom out, pan zoom in, click click click… But at regular but random in their occurrence intervals ArcMap would stop, the windows display/desktop would corrupt and multiple icons of ArcMap would appear on the taskbar and the whole PC’s screen would have difficulty refreshing. I would have to, more often than not, end the ArcMap process and loose all my edits. I had lost hours of work and spent lots of time trawling the help forums for a solution
I tried everything, I used MXD doctor to create new MXDs which seemed to stop the crashing temporarily, I even went an created a new user profile which actually worked for a small time. Finally I had had enough, I went through every element of the MXD and recreated it all, one of the logos was a PNG, for consistency I recreated it as a JPG as all the other images on the page layout were JPGs. I now don’t have any crashes, no restarts and no need to recreate an MXD. For whatever reason ArcGIS must not support fully PNGs images in my particular setup.
So if you ever have ArcMap crashing when editing, panning and zooming, I suggest you check to see if there is a PNG image somewhere on your page or data layout.
</Note to self end>