MS Word 2016 Randomly crashes!

[T_Lister]

Hi all,

 

We have recently started to experience a random crash of Word 2016. It give no notice, simply closes word without saving and reopens a blank document. This can happen either once twice or five times a day. We have the same image deployed via SCCM across most of the school, yet to our knowledge this problem is contained to at the moment two locations. The even logs notes a particular error relating to ucrtbase.dll. The only results from my research refer to IE crashing relating to this DLL and relations to Sharepoint add-ons? Yesterday afternoon I deployed a fresh image from SCCM in the hope that it had just been a file corrupting since the first install.

 

If anyone could please advise I would be most grateful!!!

 

Faulting application name: WINWORD.EXE, version: 16.0.4456.1003, time stamp: 0x5813a13a

Faulting module name: ucrtbase.dll, version: 10.0.14393.0, time stamp: 0x57898db2

Exception code: 0xc0000409

Fault offset: 0x00087fb2

Faulting process ID: 0xf34

Faulting application start time: 0x01d26be09f6eea10

Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16\WINWORD.EXE

Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\ucrtbase.dll

Report ID: d9191481-21f4-4219-8369-7a79045a3515

Faulting package full name:

Faulting package-relative application ID:

[jmak]

I've got Office 2016 installed for 20 trial users on Surface Pro 4s running Windows 10 1511 education and I have one user with this symptom. Images were deployed by WDS with multicast in a single run....

 

The problem sometimes occurs with no other applications open.

 

About to deploy it across the site and re-image the affected machine. I had it down as a one off and wasn't too worried.

[T_Lister]

We never had any issues running 1511. However we found that the GPOs don't control the windows locked slide show screen. So when pupils are logged in, because Win10 downloads the images and they can't write to C drive, our bandwidth was being hammered! Don't notice it during trials, September after we did the whole school!! Terrible, and that was on a 200MB line. We've been rolling out Win10 v16## to cure this. It is only this version that we have seen the problem. As I say, only two machines that have reported it, different models.

[Katy]

We are mostly LTSB 2015 (v1511) and haven't had the issue reported, however on my PC (Enterprise v1607) Word 2016 has started randomly crashing recently, but not managed to tie it into any specific update etc that may have gone on at the same time. The only difference I can think is that I have recently had IE open most of the time as I have been doing a lot of work on the phone system, which has an interface that doesn't work properly in Chrome. Before looking at the phones I never opened IE besides occasional testing of things.

[T_Lister]

The problem seems to be spreading...

[mulderite]

Same problem here, Word 2016 crashing with almost identical errors showing in event viewer (as per first post). Also seeing it crash when attempting to create reports from within SIMS... Not a good start to our Windows 10 rollout.

[HBPS]

I had an issue with office 2016 and sims on our admin machines. But i'd used the 64 bit version seemed to work fine with the 32bit version no crashes at all

[mrbios]

Anyone found a solution to this yet?

 

Running Office 2016 on Windows 10 Edu anniversary build, all updates up to date. Same error as OP.

 

Been trying to find a way to reproduce the error but not having any luck there.

 

EDIT: Ooooooo just found this: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-mso_win10/office-365-word-crashing-for-all-users-since/a9cb5c10-b2e8-4ce8-b516-68379f91db2d

EDIT2: damn, didn't cause the issue on mine.

EDIT3:

Can someone else check their security logs at the same time that the word error occurs? It does appear to be print/print driver related as a gpupdate occurs.

 

EDIT4: I'm going to apply the group policy "Turn off background refresh of Group Policy" setting for the time being and see if that resolves it. It stops group policy from refreshing while the machine is in use, which i don't forsee being an issue. (In Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Group Policy)

Edited February 9, 2017 by mrbios

[mrbios]

So setting the policy "turn off background refresh of group policy" has helped, but it hasn't stopped the issue.

 

It seems that on occasion group policy is refreshing in the background no matter what that setting is set to, albeit less frequently so it's not as big of a problem as before. Has anyone else found any other solutions to this issue? It definitely seems to revolve around Group policy printer mapping.

[RalphK]

I was just dealing with the same problem in our company. After some while I found out that we were having those crashes every time there was a gpupdate going on in the background.

 

 

Try to make the following registry entry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\LegacyDefaultPrinterMode (DWORD) Set the value from 0 to 1

It changes the Switch for the Standard Printer off.

 

 

This has helped and Word no longer crashes. Thanks to M$ for this nice feature!

[mrbios]

Oooo interesting find @RalphK Thank you, i'll give that a go!

 

What i've done in the mean time for mine is set the apply one do not reapply to the printers that currently apply to windows 10 PCs. Students here are on mandatory profiles so everything gets reapplied on logon, but not reapplied when gp refreshes during logon....i imagine that setting would be a problem for local or roaming profiles though so i'll give that reg key a go.