Office 365 fixlets running forever

[martin.germann]

The last few months, I had issues with o365 not updating correctly on a few clients. Sometimes, simply retrying helps, sometimes a office repair is required.
The Microsoft part of the issue is that the update silently fails.

The Bigfix issue is that Bigfix doesn’t detect the failure. The fixlet simply waits until the new version is installed according to registry:
pause while {Not exists value “DisplayVersion” whose (it as string as version = “16.0.14701.20290” ) of keys whose (value “DisplayName” of it as string as lowercase contains “365”) of key “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall” of native registry}

If the update fails, Bigfix hangs here, the action keeps running forever (or until the user reboots his machine).

This makes my monthly patch baselines hang, all other updates are also incomplete since the final reboot is never reached.

[bsellers]

I’ve been having similar issues and haven’t been able to figure out is causing the Microsoft officec2rclient.exe to silently fail. The Office update logs that end up in %temp% called [machinename-YYYYMMDD-time.log] don’t provide any insight.

I see the exactly same failures at the pause while command in the BigFix action.

My users get these errors when the problem occurs:

“Outlook.exe” - Bad Image
"The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142). Click OK to close the application"

Office repair isn’t necessary in the cases I’ve seen. Having the user reboot will typically get the Office applications launching again. So that leads me to believe some other process is stepping on the Office update, maybe a security agent.

I just wish I could reproduce the failure consistently, because I could then do some Process Exploring.

My baselines don’t hang, eventually the Office update action will update to Failed status, but then will continue through the other components of the baseline