KB5002121 breaks MS Access runtime applications

Anyway.. shame on you, Microsoft!! We pay a lot of money for licenses, Office and Windows, and what you are doing? You are pushing updates, without any info, that could shut down production applications in some process computers, only to force us to update and pay more for the same type of applications, like Access, but just with other extension, for marketing reason!

Shame on you!!

Note that Access 2010 is no longer in support, which means

1. It was not impacted by the change that is causing a problem for supported versions (2013 or later), since we aren't making any changes to Office 2010, including the one that introduced a problem.
2. It may break at any time, and it won't be fixed because it is no longer supported.

If people are using Office 2010 (including the 2010 Access Runtime), they need to be aware that it is not supported, and any issues that occur will not be addressed by Microsoft.

Shane Groff

Access Engineering

Hello,

well as we know, MS is aware and working on a fix. We're also aware and working on going to Mars one day.

Thanks to everyone that has suggested workarounds but unfortunately none worked for us. The one that seemed most promising was to recompile the ACCDE file with the updated Access. However, we were not able to do that as our Access project relies on references to another ACCDE (third party solution) and Access was not able to read the reference to the ACCDE reference so compile would fail.

The only thing that worked (very well actually) was to roll back office to the version prior to the update. Unfortunately we have Office 365 Click-to-run (CTR) so there is no easy was to uninstall an update (via Windows uninstall for example).

I just wanted to share how we did this in case it can help others get up and running. It literally takes less than 5 minutes.

1. download and run the Office Deployment tool here : https://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=49117
2. Install in an easy access directory like C:/Temp

3 ) Open Notepad and paste the following:

<Configuration>

<Updates Enabled="TRUE" TargetVersion="16.0.15330.20230" />
</Configuration>

4. Save the file as config.xml in the same directory as were you installed the Office Deployment tool in step 2
5. Open an elevated command prompt (Start, cmd, run as administrator)
6. Using the DOS prompts, navigate to your directory from step 2 and run the following command:

setup.exe /configure config.xml

7. Once the update is downloaded and finished, open Word or Excel and go into File > Account
8. In the product information section, Update options > Update now (this will do the revert)
9. Although MS has probably stopped rolling out the problematic update, you should turn off automatic updates for a while to prevent an auto-update back tot he problematic version.
10. To do this, File > Account > Product Information > Update options > Disable updates

That's it, you're back to before the nightmare.

In step 3, we revert back to version 20230. Depending on your type of Office, it might be something else. You can find the version history here : https://docs.microsoft.com/officeupdates/update-history-office365-proplus-by-date?redirectSourcePath=%252fen-us%252farticle%252fae942449-1fca-4484-898b-a933ea23def7

All the info above is taken directly from MS Support here : https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-revert-to-an-earlier-version-of-office-2bd5c457-a917-d57e-35a1-f709e3dda841

In the end, it is still a pain to do this on numerous machines but it is a fix that does 100% work. It might be easier in the end to do this without having to change any coding in your Access project and will insure that everything will work once the fixed patched is released.

Finally, please note that once we reverted, our Access project would still not compile because the update had broken our references to the ACCDE our project depends on. Once we fixed the references, everything was working.

Good luck.

Mike

Sorry to hear about the work load this creates in the interim. I am also waiting on Microsoft Office to fix the issue as it is not practical to recompile all the databases that have been deployed. I wish more testing is done before these updates are released given that this is not the first time these updates have caused issues to MS Access.

A fix like this is rolled out automatically. Most likely the Access team will post it here.