Software bugs are a fact of life. In today’s feature-packed applications, it’s no surprise that, given the increasing complexity of many modern programs, something at some point is going to fall over. However, if an app’s primary purpose in life is to handle text, you would hope the simple act of typing wouldn’t cause it to close.
According to Microsoft, this exact issue is affecting certain installs of Outlook, Word and OneNote, and its Outlook and Office teams are currently investigating (via Neowin). In a support post, MS defines the problem as:
“After updating to [Office] Version 2407 Build 17830.20138 or higher you find that Outlook, Word, or OneNote may unexpectedly close when typing or doing other authoring tasks such as spell check.”
Yep, the simple act of typing or performing a spell check can cause the applications to close, undoubtedly inspiring a choice selection of curse words from affected users. Microsoft says that you can confirm the issue by looking for Event 1000 or Event 1001 in the Windows Event Viewer Application Log and that the issue may be caused by older language packs:
“The faulting module name will vary depending on what language packs you have installed. For example, mscss7it.dll for Italian, or mscss7ge.dll, for German, and others could include: EN, ES, FR, GE, IT, NP, PB.”
Currently, MS advises a workaround involving an online repair of the affected Office application, searching for and uninstalling old Office language installations, and reinstalling the Language Accessory Pack for Microsoft 365.Â
Affected users are also pointed towards a thread on the Microsoft forums in which multiple users report their Outlook installations crashing from simply typing, saving drafts, and typing in different languages—both in the Windows version and the Android application.Â
Many of the users in the thread report that they were typing in (or spellchecking) German when the problem occurred, although by the look of the support post MS seems to think multiple languages could cause the affected apps to close.
Chalk one up for Notepad, I guess, although it’s not like you can send an email with the app I internally refer to as “Ol’ Reliable”. Still, it does have a surprisingly good spellcheck and multiple useful features these days, and I’ve yet to have it crash on me while I’m taking notes. Sometimes the classics are the best, ey?