1

Good afternoon all,

So I work for a County IT office and we have been getting tickets about Microsoft Office programs not opening at all. All of the computers on the county network are running Windows 10 22H2 and are within 2-4 years old, We have done all the basics, reboot, shut the computer down for a couple minutes, repair and nothing seems to work. The only thing that does is uninstalling and then rebooting and installing it again. Sometimes they are having issues with having Adobe PDF files open as well and sometimes not. After we reinstall the problem goes away but a couple users have had the exact same issue again. Is there anything that I am missing?

4 Spice ups
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How are office updates being applied to these systems? Overview of update channels for Microsoft 365 Apps - Deploy Office | Microsoft Learn
We have some user systems that are on the ‘Current Channel’ update schedule. And the users sometimes perceive this office application not opening behavior. When that happens, it seems to be the result of an in-process update that I assume has simply not completed yet because if they wait some [fairly significant] period of time, it will eventually start working normally again. And by ‘fairly significant’ I mean probably in the order of 30 minutes or so.

3

Apart from removing the product and reinstalling, what troubleshooting have you done?

Event logs?

Safe mode office app?

Removed/disabled any plugins?

Do they need the installed app or could they use office.com?

4

The are in the Monthly Enterprise Channel. And I see what you’re saying but if it was due to an update then I would expect all of the users to be having this issue when the update comes out. But it’s random and with no real pattern to it that we have seen.

5

What other programs are installed on these computers? I ran into an issue a couple of months ago where the AV we were using was causing Office activation to randomly break for some users while others weren’t impacted.

Check Event Viewer for clues as to what’s happening at the same time.

6

How far are users getting, double click, something happens or nothing happens?

Is it all O365 programs or just certain ones? Do the browser apps work?

It might be worthwhile to check the 365 admin console to see if there are any active issues that could be the culprit.

Also, after you try to launch the desktop apps, do any related processes show up in task manager?