"microsoft word protect view has stopped working"

Hello Aaron

Thanks a lot for sharing your experiences with the rest of the community.

I would have never thought these two things could be connected to each other but it seems they are. I can confirm this as I too use DisplayLink from my Surface Pro 3 to power 2 24" monitors.

Hopefully DisplayLink will issue an update soon but it's strange it only seems to affect opening Office files in protected mode.

Thanks

Robin

Thanks Eduardo for tracking this down!

Agreed - thanks Eduardo! Definitely grateful for an active and supportive user community.

In what is probably the best customer support experience I've had in my life, I reached out to DisplayLink about the potential conflict and received a follow up response no more than 5 minutes later. Here's the scoop:

• DisplayLink has recently been made aware of the issue and is currently testing a new release that includes a fix for it.
  • 11/24 update: per my support contact at DisplayLink, pending no issues are found with the current build the ETA for the updated driver is mid-December.
• There is a better workaround for this issue than the one previously recommended of disabling Protected View:
  • Open an Office application (I used Word) and go Options > Advanced and check the "Disable hardware graphics acceleration" box and click OK.

I am happy to report that this resolved my issue and I am now able to preview attachments within Outlook with Protected View still enabled. I didn't even have to reboot for the change to take effect.

Big tip of the hat to DisplayLink for their stellar customer service and follow up on this. Hope this information can be of help to others dealing with this issue.

I did have to restart Outlook for the change to take effect, but it worked perfectly.  I too have a USB dock that uses Display Link software and would have never suspected that as the cause of this issue, but it clearly was.  I can't thank you enough for tracking this down, as I had spent a couple hours playing with registry edits, program uninstall/reinstall routines, etc. without success.  Loss of attachment preview capability in Outlook was a big inconvenience.

As an additional point, I began experiencing a significant slowdown in Internet Explorer 11 performance that also relates to "protected view" mode (If PV is off, performance is fine, if it's on, page rendering takes 15-45 seconds).  I thought these issues might be related, but Display Link support, who similar to your case replied in a matter of hours with a well-written response, indicated that they don't see a connection between the issues.

Hi everyone ,

I'm happy to report that after a lot of trail and error I have managed to successfully track down the culprit of this issue.

It turns out those machines that have a USB dock use DisplayLink software - this causes a fault in conjunction with Windows 10 - went ahead and uninstalled the software and BINGO - everything is back to normal 

Now just have to wait on the folks from DisplayLink to release different software/drivers or a patch to fix this if they haven't already done so :)

Really appreciate the follow up information on this, Eduard. I have and use a DisplayLink adapter with my XPS so this will have to get fixed with a driver update for it since uninstalling is not an option for my particular use case.

I guess now I can go hound the DisplayLink folks for a fix. Again, really appreciate your helping to narrow down the source of this frustration.