Microsoft rolls back update crashing Office 365 applications

Microsoft has rolled back the Microsoft 365 Enterprise Channel version 2206 update after multiple users reported Office applications kept crashing.

The applications, including Outlook, Word, and Excel, crashed when users viewed contact cards or hovered over an email sender’s icon.

“Just upgraded to Office 2206 in Monthly Enterprise Channel and whenever you move the cursor over the picture or icon of the sender of an email, Outlook immediately crashes,” a Microsoft Answers forum user posted.

“In addition, just found this is not Outlook specific. When using a shared file in other products (Excel, Word, PowerPoint) if you open the contact card of a user working in the file, it also crashes,” the same user said.

Microsoft tracked the incident as MO412229 and said it investigated the user reports.

“We’re analysing recent changes made to the service and attempting to gather diagnostic data from an internal reproduction of the issue so we can determine our next troubleshooting steps,” Microsoft said in the incident report.

Microsoft advised affected users to roll back to version 2205 to fix the issue.

In another Microsoft Answers post made today, a user reported that Microsoft had withdrawn the distribution of the 2206 update.

In a separate Outlook-related issue, users have reported that Outlook crashes or freezes immediately after being opened.

“When you start Outlook Desktop, it gets past loading profile and processing, briefly opens, and then stops responding,” Microsoft said.

If Outlook crashes, it will be logged in the Windows Event Viewer Application Log as Event 1,000 or Event 1,001.

These events will also have the following event details:

• Faulting application name: OUTLOOK.EXE, version: 16.0.15427.20194, time stamp: 0x62e9be45
• Faulting module name: mso20win32client.dll, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x62e4fd3c
• Exception code: 0x01483052
• Fault offset: 0x000000000024074d
• Faulting process id: 0x1328
• Faulting application start time: 0x01d8acfa5984509d
• Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\OUTLOOK.EXE
• Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Office16\mso20win32client.dll

“This issue occurs when the EmailAddress string data value under the Office identity is blank,” Microsoft said.

“We do not know why the EmailAddress key is not being set properly.”

Microsoft has suggested the following workarounds in the meantime:

• Sign out of Office and then sign back in to Office to repopulate the identity registry settings.
• If the identity is still not getting set properly you can turn off Support Diagnostics in the Windows registry. This turns off the option to submit an in-app ticket using Help, Contact Support, and its feature path that triggers Outlook to stop responding:

  [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\
16.0\Outlook\Options\General]
"DisableSupportDiagnostics"=dword:00000001

• You can try manually setting the email address to the identity of the user that is seeing the issue in the registry path referenced above.

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