Smart Notebook crashing on Save

[Scottyuk30]

Hi everyone,

 

Had a weird issue this week with Smart Notebook crashing when you go to save a file. We are using version 24. Upgrading to 25.1 does not fix it.

Contacted Smart who were surprisingly quite helpful on the phone, the case was created and referred to the tech department. 

They came back with a fix, which worked on Thursday but the error came back today. I've emailed them back to let them know and will post here when I've heard back from them.

 

Here is the fix (albeit temporary) if anyone needs it (surprise surprise it's a Microsoft Update issue) - 

 

Thank you for reporting this to us and I'm sorry that you are experiencing this problem. SMART is aware of this issue and has been actively investigating; It appears to be related to the known issues documented in the January 2026 Windows updates release notes regarding Save/Open dialog crashes. Please note that this issue is also affecting other applications outside of SMART software. With this in mind we do have a potential workaround. Can you please test the following:


Current Workaround: Unregister GROOVEEX.DLL (Microsoft Office's SharePoint shell extension) on affected machines:

1. Open Command Prompt as Administrator
* Press Windows key
* Type cmd
* Right-click "Command Prompt" → select "Run as administrator"
2. Run this command:

regsvr32 /u "C:\Program<file:///C:/Program> Files\Microsoft Office\root\VFS\ProgramFilesX86\Microsoft Office\Office16\GROOVEEX.DLL"

* User should see: "DllUnregisterServer in [path] succeeded"
* Test Notebook's Save As function

Note: This disables SharePoint file overlays and related context menu items. If SharePoint functionality needs to be restored, it can be re-enabled using:



regsvr32 "C:\Program<file:///C:/Program> Files\Microsoft Office\root\VFS\ProgramFilesX86\Microsoft Office\Office16\GROOVEEX.DLL"

 

[k12sysadmin]

I had to make an account just to say thanks for posting this! This same issue was a plague on our org, and this post directly lead to the fix. 

The syntax that worked for me was just slightly different:
regsvr32 /u "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\VFS\ProgramFilesX86\Microsoft Office\Office16\GROOVEEX.DLL"

 

Hopefully this is addressed by Microsoft soon. 

 

Also created an Intune script that can remediate and log this issue:

 

$regsvr = "$env:SystemRoot\System32\regsvr32.exe"

$officePaths = @(
    "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\VFS\ProgramFilesX86\Microsoft Office\Office16\GROOVEEX.DLL",
    "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\VFS\ProgramFilesX86\Microsoft Office\Office16\GROOVEEX.DLL"
)

foreach ($path in $officePaths) {
    if (Test-Path $path) {
        Write-Output "Found: $path"
        $process = Start-Process -FilePath $regsvr `
            -ArgumentList "/s /u `"$path`"" `
            -Wait `
            -PassThru

        Write-Output "Exit code: $($process.ExitCode)"
    }
}

 

Edited February 12 by k12sysadmin

[Scottyuk30]

Hi, 

 

I'm very pleased that this helped you out. Unfortunately for us, the error came back a couple of days later. 

I contacted them again and submitted an error dump. They came back to me and said they are looking into the error again for me, bizarrely they then provided me a link to a trial build for future release of Smart 5.1usb that apparently has the fix in it?!?! I installed it and it has worked for a few days with no return of the error. Here is the link if you need to download it

https://downloads.smarttech.com/software/education/25.1/win/25.1.356.1/smart25-1usb.exe

 

Its been the bane of my life for over a week!

 

Scott