Eugene Starostin

Office Alarm – Excel experienced a serious problem with the ‘microsoft office live add-in’

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 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:

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:

Excel experienced a serious problem with 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 Sub

You 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…

You may also be interested in:

Creating Excel COM add-in step-by-step
Developing Excel Automation add-in in .net
Building Excel Automation add-ins in Delphi

9 Comments

  • BenM says:

    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?

  • Andrei Smolin (Add-in Express Team) says:

    Sorry, at the moment we don’t know a correct answer to your question.

  • lambycheng says:

    add in sign in with problem, how to solve it and do what

    pls give me the trend to solve it

  • Andrei Smolin (Add-in Express Team) says:

    What kind of problem do you have? Any error messages (in English, please)?

  • MrsRo says:

    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.

  • Dmitry Kostochko (Add-in Express Team) says:

    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.

  • Kwame says:

    Microsoft office 2010 is installed on windows 7 and all excel works saved in 97-2007 opens correctly except two of them. whenever I try to open those two works it comes up that MICROSOFT EXCEL HAS STOPPED WORKING. I have repaired the printer drivers, and MS OFFICE but the problem remains. Surprisingly the work opens on different PCs with the same MS OFFICE.

  • Eugene Starostin says:

    You can try to create those 2 workbooks in the same Excel version as they were originally created. And then save them with the highest supported workbook format/type. Another way is to use some repairing service or follow Microsoft’s recommendations.

  • hk says:

    Solution is:-Sharepoint2010
    Click on Site Actions > Site Settings. Under Site Collection administration, click on Site Collection Features and activate “Open Documents in Client

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