[ms office - 2016] Increasing numbers of Outlook crashes

[DavR]

Has anyone else seen quite a high rate of Outlook crashes this month?

 

I've got a couple of users complaining about repeated crashes, and I've noticed a few times myself that it goes to "not responding" and catches up a minute or two later, as long as you don't prod it too hard (I assume others aren't as patient with it as I am).

 

We've got Outlook 2016 non-O365 edition, running latest batch of updates (v16.0.5182.1000). We are running in cached mode to remote Exchange servers, which may have something to do with it, but nothing that I can control or prove to our email supplier.

 

I've tried trashing and recreating Outlook user profiles, and disabling add-ins, but it doesn't seem to make a great deal of difference.

 

Just thought I'd put it out there and see if others were having similar experiences?

[DavR]

We don't always seem to get error messages in Event Log, but, I have found this one.

 

Faulting application name: OUTLOOK.EXE, version: 16.0.5182.1000, time stamp: 0x60b66d94Faulting module name: mso99Lwin32client.dll, version: 16.0.5056.1000, time stamp: 0x5f32dc96Exception code: 0xc0000005Fault offset: 0x000000000009a6eaFaulting process ID: 0x2b00Faulting application start time: 0x01d7b398425155b9Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16\OUTLOOK.EXEFaulting module path: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Office16\mso99Lwin32client.dllReport ID: 7190ea4c-f8a2-4821-bc6b-1afea2aca15bFaulting package full name: Faulting package-relative application ID:

[mikemcsharry]

I'm not an admin of anything using Outlook anymore, but weird problem I came across a few times were the default printer and/or grpahics card drivers / graphics acceleration options.

 

Do you have any more / less reliable machines. If everything having problems do you have a windows update problem? Have you been applying any servicing stacks required??

 

Are any seriously problematic machines struggling for connectivity back to the exchange server?

[e-class]

We've had something similar, and Microsoft have suggested the September CU is to blame. Lots out there on the internet about similar issues.

 

Have a read of this:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-emergency-update-resolves-kb5005565-app-freezes-crashes/

 

We've disabled EAF for the time being.

[DavR]

I'm not an admin of anything using Outlook anymore, but weird problem I came across a few times were the default printer and/or grpahics card drivers / graphics acceleration options.

 

Do you have any more / less reliable machines. If everything having problems do you have a windows update problem? Have you been applying any servicing stacks required??

 

Are any seriously problematic machines struggling for connectivity back to the exchange server?

 

All up to date with the latest updates, WSUS is working as expected.

 

Interesting theory about printer and/or graphics drivers, this issue has only come about since we came back in September, but it's hard to divine whether that's due to our recent update to 20H2, or the mentioned bug in the latest CU. Could conceivably be a driver that doesn't play nicely with 20H2, but I've no indications yet. Something to bear in mind though.

[DavR]

We've had something similar, and Microsoft have suggested the September CU is to blame. Lots out there on the internet about similar issues.

 

Have a read of this:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-emergency-update-resolves-kb5005565-app-freezes-crashes/

 

We've disabled EAF for the time being.

 

Thanks for this tip. I can't find anything that mentions this is an issue for Outlook, or anywhere under Exploit Protection that says that it's running any protections on Outlook.exe, but you never know!

 

I've stuck the Known Issue Rollback fix into our GPOs, I'll see if that offers any improvement.