Heads Up! KB2597166 - Causes Excel to break badly.

[m25man]

Good old Microsoft does it again with the Security Update for Excel KB2597166 MS12-030: Description of the security update for Excel 2010: May 8, 2012

 

Once this gets on to your systems you can expect Excel to start crashing, memory Errors, Unable to Save, Random sensless prompts and messages, System comes to a standstill with locked up screens and all sorts.

 

I have Win7 64bit workstations and 32bit Office and it busted all of them. Uninstall and its fixed instantly.

 

They have know about the bug since release on 08/05/12 but have yet to resolve the issue.

 

You can decline the update in WSUS and set it for removal which I have just done as I manually removed it from a load of machines yesterday and it re-installed itself again today and I started to get a load of complaints again.

[mac_shinobi]

Handy to know - thank's for the heads up

[Danp]

Installed 9 days ago, no issues here.

[m25man]

Installed 9 days ago, no issues here.

 

Maybe your users just havent hit the wall yet, 5/9/2012 - Excel Security Update Causing Issues with Excel (KB2597166)

[Michael]

I've not seen this issue myself either, but thanks for letting us all know. It appears to affect users using huge spreadsheets or various add-ons/formulas (reading the previous link).

 

What those of you who are affected could try - hold down the Ctrl key, then open Excel and run it in Safe Mode. This should prove whether or not it's an add-on or something else.

[m25man]

My users mostly affected were those handling larger spreadsheets or those importing/manipulating from CSV's and Databases.

Marketing were the first to notice as they have sheets with >10k Lines in them but others soon followed as they tried to Sort Columns and do cross tab formulae.

The impact is pretty widespread but certainly to a much lesser degree for the "Amateur Excel User" they just slow down and things become jerky and generally awkward, the bigger spreadsheet users actually gave up and went home on Wednesday as they couldnt use the machines until we found the problem.

 

Not good M$...

[AngryTechnician]

Haven't had any problems here yet, including on my own workstation, but thanks for the heads-up.

[philshort]

This update stopped Excel from even loading on my workstation, which I documented on my blog (which I can't post a link to).

[mac_shinobi]

My users mostly affected were those handling larger spreadsheets or those importing/manipulating from CSV's and Databases.

Marketing were the first to notice as they have sheets with >10k Lines in them but others soon followed as they tried to Sort Columns and do cross tab formulae.

The impact is pretty widespread but certainly to a much lesser degree for the "Amateur Excel User" they just slow down and things become jerky and generally awkward, the bigger spreadsheet users actually gave up and went home on Wednesday as they couldnt use the machines until we found the problem.

 

Not good M$...

 

Fixed the issue some of our users were having with ref to importing textual data into excel and would error out with some unrelated random error - removed ms kb as per here and bingo banga bonga, jobs a good un