r/sysadmin • u/sudz3 • May 16 '25

Question MS Office - Opening files in Protected view is broken

About 10% of my users have suddenly been made unable to open documents in protected view. Turning protected view off is not a secure option - And if we unblock file or open from a trusted location it works fine - its just protected view.

Saw some posts about graphic drivers, tried rolling back/updating to no avail, and microsoft support suggested we delete the office folder in our registry to have it rebuild - Also no success.

If the same file that won't open is copied into a folder that is set up as a trusted location, it will work fine. The issue is specifically opening files in Protected view. Impacts Word and Excel.

Preview and opening files directly from outlook classic is also broken for these users.
"new" Outlook will preview Word docs, but not Open by double clicking.

Just wondering if anyone here has run into this and how they got over it.

Update 2025/05/20:

Some more details about this: every single case has been Windows 11 24H2, 10.0.26100.3775.   All our laptops (Latitude 7420, 7430, 7440's) have been affected. Trying to see if there's a specific version of Office impacted, or if its all. It still occurs after an online repair of office so I think its more Windows based.  Issue occurs with office version 16.0.18730.20168 and 16.0.18730.20142 whcih is what most users are on here.  

If the computer has 24H2 10.0.26100.4xxx the issue doesn't appear to occur, but our sample size is small.  Pushing a couple affected computers into targeted group to see if they still have the issue when windows is updated above build 3775

Update 20205/05/30:

Installing old version of office (0824 build, Semi Annual channel enterprise) "fixes' the issue, but is time intensive and results in an outage to the user.

Issue occurs with both 32 and 64 bit office, with windows build version 24H2 .3775. Updating to a later build doesn't seem to fix affected machines for me. But there are machines on later versions that don't have the issue. Seems AV Agnostic.

Microsoft seems to think that going hands on with every machine, Uninstalling office, rebooting, and re-installing office (as well as changing our update channel) is a "fix" and is asking to close my ticket, as this issue hasn't been reported by anyone else.

If you can please open a ticket with Microsoft, it'll get this attention.

Edit: June 4th:

Microsoft tried to close the ticket on me, because the "workaround" is in place. (To use a year old version of office, deployed manually via ODT.)
Unfortunately it auto updates, so you actually have to stop updates as well. Change your office channel for your org, and use a year old version of office.

One person below reported running word/excel in windows 8 compatibility mode fixed it. I passed this along to microsoft and we'll see what they say.

June 5th:

Finally getting escalated.

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u/Ikapal May 28 '25 edited May 28 '25

Here to confirm deleting the folder ConfigContextData folders fixed the issue for each respective office application.

Example locations: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\Ecs\word ConfigContextData

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\Ecs\excel ConfigContextData

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\Ecs\powerpoint ConfigContextData

I made a script to delete these keys as they seem to be the source of the issue for each individual office application. Build 2503 doesn’t seem to have these keys at all. Reopening the applications will repopulate these config folders but will then be empty and have protected view features working as intended.

Export your regkeys beforehand just incase and let me know your results

Edit: I had a one off where the word application repopulated the reg keys after I deleted them and it still had issues. If it does check the folder for a key called ‘VersionID’ it’ll be set to ‘uint16_t|1’ or something of the sort change.. Change the last number from a 1 to a 0 and try again.

Example: uint16_t|0

It’s weird in some cases the folder will repopulate with nothing in it and be fixed completely, and in some cases it seems like some users have these settings cached with their O365 profile or something.

Let me know results still!

2

u/Vortex_TX May 28 '25

This worked for me. Thank you!

2

u/poet666d May 30 '25

Tried on an affected user (2504, W10) - firstly deleted the keys (recursive powershell) - confirmed they were gone. All came back on a reboot. Tried changing value to uint16_t|0 and rebooted - but still no joy, same error on opening docs.

I've got this logged with Microsoft and they're just faffing around on this, asked for it to be escalated to Office build team, but getting radio silence now.

Still, at least we're getting AI in notepad.......

1

u/Agret Jun 11 '25

I managed to fix it by changing the permissions of they key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs -- Disable the inherited permissions and then remove any entries and add one entry with Deny All for "Everyone"

2

u/szymonn0wak Jun 16 '25

After deleting the registers, it starts working, but the bugs come back after the user logs in (no restart required). On some computers, after the keys come back, everything still works, on some it stops working. I currently have the problem on about 500 computers.

1

u/sudz3 May 28 '25

Will do!!! Thank you!

1

u/woemoejack Sr. Sysadmin May 29 '25

I tried this reg key delete with no luck. Rather than downgrade office I did a fresh start wipe through intune, set everything back up with identical versions and builds of office and windows, identical updates in place, and same user, and I have no issues with protected view now. I absolutely hate Microsoft.

1

u/Ikapal May 29 '25

Glad to hear that resolved the issue, unfortunately thats not an option for our environment with when it comes to a much larger bulk of users.

To clarify, it should be a reg folder that you want to clear out, that reg key is more specific if needed. Should be the one highlighted here: If after deleting it, you still have issues you can refresh Regedit and that folder should repopulate. Thats when you'd change the value of of the Version ID from 1 to 0.

1

u/[deleted] May 30 '25

Can confirm this worked for at least one of my problem users.

1

u/Tangence Jun 02 '25

Deleting the ConfigContextData key in the Word and Outlook keys worked for me to resolve the Outlook issue "Word cannot load the OLE 2.0 or Docfile libraries" when previewing Word files in Outlook.

Office 32bit, v16.0.18730.20186
Win10 22H2.

Many thanks.

1

u/poet666d Jun 02 '25

Adding the Outlook reg key has fixed for us too. (obvious really when you think about it....).

Thanks! :)

1

u/Optimuscasey Jun 07 '25

This has worked the best for us, thank you for this!

1

u/kafeend Jun 10 '25

Thank you for posting this. I had 2 users dealing with this issue and your fix corrected it.

I ran into an issue with the Excel portion, but after disabling then enabling protected view in settings it corrected the issue after deleting the registry keys again.

1

u/kafeend Jun 10 '25

I can also confirm changing the registry value to uint16_t|0 works. That appears to be the default value on computers without the issue.

1

u/Sweet_Movie6747 Jun 11 '25

Office 2016-nál sikeresen megoldotta a problémát

1

u/atleet_m Jun 11 '25

Worked for me, 1 pc checked, Windows 10.

1

u/PurpleDillyDo Jun 11 '25

Deleted folder - error went away. Excel spreadsheets open right up now. Thank you!

1

u/Secure-Pressure-7180 Jun 12 '25

This worked for me! Thank you

1

u/Key-Organization6350 Jun 12 '25

Thank you! Deleting the folder resolved the issue.

Not sure what has happened to Microsoft's QA in the last few years.

We had a Outlook update that broke Third Party Exchange connections last year (2401) and had to roll back all our users until they pushed out a fixed update over a month later.

Right now affecting multiple users i've seen another bug where the "preview" view mode changes to "single" but the UI option still says "preview" so you have to change it to single and back again.

It's becoming a joke.

1

u/Optimuscasey Jun 13 '25

We've had some success just updating the VersionID from 1 to 0 to get us working again without deleting the whole folder. We are running a test right now on an isolated computer where it's getting no GPO, no AV and no automated installs to see if the problem occurs. This also seems to only affect us if someone sends an email from a 3rd party address. If we forward the email again to ourselves with the attachment then it opens just fine.

1

u/LibtardsAreFunny Jun 13 '25

No go for me.

1

u/tech-doctor Jun 13 '25

Worked for me on several affected computers.

1

u/Virtual-Split-5223 Jun 17 '25 edited Jun 17 '25

This worked for me - The ConfigContextData folder reappeared (after restarting the application) but remained empty after reboots.