14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has confirmed in a post on the TechNet blogs that the KB2817630 update released on Patch Tuesday is indeed causing problems to a number of users due to what seems to be a compatibility issue with Outlook 2013.
While the company said that it’s still working on a fix right now, it also advised users to uninstall and hide the patch from the Windows Update screen.
“Due to a version incompatibility between outlook.exe and mso.dll, a mismatched reference to a data structure causes the ‘Minimize’ button in the navigation pane to render incorrectly, typically extremely large to the point that the navigation pane is ‘invisible’ to the user. The issue only manifests when incompatible versions of outlook.exe and mso.dll exist on the system,” the company said.
“If both versions are earlier (lower) than 4535.1000, or both versions are later (higher) than 4535.1000, the problem does not manifest. If one file is updated but the other is not, the problem is evident. The incompatible state is created by installing either the September Public Update OR the August Cumulative update, but not both. Users of MSI-based products that have automatic updates enabled are those that are most likely to have encountered the issue.”
Microsoft says that both Office 2013 Standard and Office 2013 Professional Plus are affected by this buggy update, while all the other versions are on the safe side. Office 2013 Home & Student and Office 365, for example, should work flawlessly after the latest update.
In addition, the company has promised to re-release the botched update sometime in the near future, with the correct patch to be delivered via the same Windows Update feature that’s available in the operating system.
Until then, make sure you uninstall and hide the patch from the Update screen, just to make sure it doesn’t break down your Office 2013 installation.