Thursday, July 10, 2014

Excel Crash: Visual Studio (10) Tools for Offce Add-in -- vs10exceladaptor

Solution

Solution thus-far has just been to disable the add-in for all users. We don't know of anyone actively using this add-in so that works for us. If you need the add-in I would look towards compatibility. 0xC0000005 typically indicates that a program tried to access memory it's not allowed to. This could mean another plug-in isn't playing nice, or you might try disabling DEP (though this is a pain for office, and more than a bit of a security risk).

To disable add-in for all users, found the best way was to log in as admin, find the excel executable (excel.exe) > right click > run as admin. Then go to File > Options > add-in > com add-ins > go. Then uncheck the boxe(s) for the "Visual Studio Tools for Office Design-Time Adaptor for Excel".

Story

Had some users complaining about excel crashing on our terminal server. This is a terminal (RDS) server that students use to remotely access lab applications via thin-clients, so it has just about every program under the sun installed on it. I mention this only because this means we have about 1000 different excel add-ins loading/available which is what I expect is causing the underlying issue. Also worth noting, Thin clients connect via XenDesktop (7.1); this could also be a cause of the error.



Other notes on server: Server 2008R2 (fully updated, x64), Office 2013 x86

Looking at the even logs, I see the excel crash (Error, Aplication Error, Event ID: 1000)

Faulting application name: EXCEL.EXE, version: 15.0.4535.1507, time stamp: 0x52282875
Faulting module name: EXCEL.EXE, version: 15.0.4535.1507, time stamp: 0x52282875
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0005a802
Faulting process id: 0x2380
Faulting application start time: 0x01cf9c61a803a93c
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\EXCEL.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\EXCEL.EXE
Report Id: ed04ac54-0854-11e4-9867-d4bed9f3434f
Which doesn't give us much. In past experience, 0xC0000005 is a generic "Memory Access violation" error -- a program tried to access memory it didn't have permission to.  The next entry in the even log is a bit more useful (Error, Microsoft Office 15, EventID 2001)

Microsoft Excel: Rejected Safe Mode action : Excel is running into problems with the 'vs10exceladaptor' add-in. If this keeps happening, disable this add-in and check for available updates. Do you want to disable it now?.
This appears to be something that gets installed with visual studio, no idea what it does. I went ahead and disabled it for all users (see notes in Solution) since I'm not aware of anyone using that add-in. Worth noting that I initially tried disabling the add-in through the registry (HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\Excel\Addins\VS10ExcelAdaptor\ -- Set LoadBehavior to 0) but that didn't seem to have any effect.


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