Facepalm

Microsoft is investigating customer reports of a known issue causing Outlook for Microsoft 365 to freeze and crash right after opening.

According to a new support document published by Redmond on Thursday, these Outlook desktop client crashes will be automatically logged and can be confirmed by checking the Windows Event Viewer Application Log for Event 1000 or Event 1001.

On systems affected by this bug, customers will find that these event entries list 0x01483052 exception codes with 0x000000000024074d fault offsets and 0x1328 faulting process IDs. 

“When you start Outlook Desktop, it gets past loading profile and processing, briefly opens, and then stops responding,” Microsoft explains.

“This issue occurs when the EmailAddress string data value under the Office identity is blank.”

The identity key should be listed under the ComputerHKEY_CURRENT_USERSOFTWAREMicrosoftOffice16.0CommonIdentityIdentities registry path, but the key is empty in cases when Outlook is crashing right after opening.

Empty Outlook identity key
Empty Outlook identity key causing crashes (Microsoft)

Workaround available

Microsoft added that it’s currently investigating this ongoing issue and will update the support article as soon as a fix is available.

“We do not know why the EmailAddress key is not being set properly. It’s best if this key is set by the Office application, so it is preferred to use the most supported options first,” the company added.

While working on a resolution for this known issue, Microsoft has provided affected customers with several workarounds:

  • Sign out of Office and then sign back into Office to repopulate the identity registry settings. For more information, use Sign in to Office.

  • If the identity is still not getting set properly, you can turn off Support Diagnostics which turns off the option to submit an In App ticket using Help, Contact Support, and its feature path that triggers Outlook to stop responding by setting the following registry key (more info available here):

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice16.0OutlookOptionsGeneral] 
    “DisableSupportDiagnostics”=dword:00000001

  • You can try manually setting the email address to the identity of the user that is seeing the issue in the registry path referenced in the issue specifics above.

Microsoft has also recently fixed a bug causing the Outlook email client to crash when reading Uber receipt emails or any other email containing tables.

Redmond also pulled a Microsoft 365 update today after users reported that Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Office applications are crashing when viewing contact cards or hovering over a user’s name or photo.

Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com