Strange things started happening around us. Swine flu added to the global economic crisis, and we have problems with Office 2007 and the Office Live Add-in added to our pre-release testing for compatibility with the recently released Office Service Pack 2. The fact of the matter is that…
“Microsoft Office Excel has stopped working” or how to crash Excel 2007 with the Office Live Add-in step-by-step
- Check out if you have Office Live Add-in Update 1.3. installed.
- Load Visual Studio 2008, create a Windows Forms application.
- Add a reference to Microsoft Excel 12.0 Object Library to your project.
- Add a button to the form and handle it with the following code:
Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object,_
ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
Dim app As Excel.Application = New Excel.Application()
app.Visible = True
app.Quit()
End Sub
- Important! Disable all network connections.
- Important! Unload all Office applications.
- Run the project, click the button.
- And voilà: Microsoft Office Excel has stopped working:
- Click Close program, close the project.
- Start Excel manually and here’s what we get: Excel experienced serious problems with the microsoft office live add-in:
Workaround
It all lies in a nutshell! Just give your processor some time to cool down :)
Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object,_
ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
Dim app As Excel.Application = New Excel.Application()
app.Visible = True
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000) ' <=== Workaround!!!
app.Quit()
End SubYou need to disable the Office Live Add-in if…
Righto, if Dr. Watson reports make you feel giddy, you need to disable the Office Live Add-in :)
Applies to
The problem occurs only on Excel 2007 (without SP, with SP1, with SP2) with Office Live Add-in Update 1.3 installed (OLConnector.dll version is 2.0.2313.0). Well then, no Windows update will help, even despite the fact that Office Live Add-in, Update 1.3 comes as part of Microsoft Optional software update.
What about Add-in Express?
At first sight, the code sample above is of no use at all – it opens and closes Excel straight away. However, this is at first glance only. In fact, a great deal of useful code can be put between New Excel.Application() and app.Quit(). For example, Add-in Express acts exactly according to this model when cleaning up all traces of the add-in when it is being unregistered. And it was unregistration of add-ins when we ran into the problem of Excel 2007 + Office Live Add-in. But that’s not the half of the Office Live Add-in. To be continued…
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6 Comments
Sorry, at the moment we don’t know a correct answer to your question.
Thanks for the confirmation.
I’ve had the same problem and came to the same conclusion, but I’ve no idea why this delay is needed – has anyone found more information on how we can programmatically determine when the Excel.Application object is ready to be accessed? What if a customer’s computer takes 1001ms to initialise Excel?
add in sign in with problem, how to solve it and do what
pls give me the trend to solve it
What kind of problem do you have? Any error messages (in English, please)?
I keep getting an error message saying that Microsoft Windows Live Add In has stopped working. What can I do to avoid getting this message.
Can you please specify when exactly you are getting the error message? Does it happen during installation/uninstallation of a COM add-in? If it is so, and your add-in is based on Add-in Express, please contact our support service, we will try to help.