[German]A German blog reader has encountered issues after using an Inplace Upgrade from Windows 7 SP 1 to Windows 10 May 2019 Update when Microsoft Office 2013 is installed. Here is some information that might save some work for those affected.
Frequent German blog reader Markus B. is an owner of a small IT company. Some time ago he sent me a mail with the relevant information (thanks for that), which I simply posted as an article within my German blog. But I forgot to deliver an English version. Here is now the article for my English readers.
Issues after Upgrade
Since the release of Windows 10 Version 1903, Markus B. has noticed a crude bug in the Inplace Upgrade of Windows 7 in conjunction with Microsoft Office 2013. He sent me his description so that I could publish it on the blog and save other users from a lot of work. By the way, this behavior cannot be observed with Microsoft Office 2010 / 2016 / 2019. Here is the error description by Markus:
Currently, we very often perform in-place upgrades in companies to migrate from Win7 (mostly x64) to Win10 (now 1903). However, if MS Office 2013 is installed under Windows 7, MS Word / MS Excel / MS Outlook will still open properly after the upgrade (using a 1903 image), but will close again automatically after 1-3 seconds.
That’s a pretty stupid bug, of course. I have searched once, here is a longer thread with a similar error description.
After Windows 10 Version 1909 has released, I would claim that the issue also happens with this build.
Workaround: Deactivate Hardware acceleration
Markus B. wrote that a short research on the Internet showed that the error can be eliminated by deactivating the hardware acceleration. He states that the control is done via the 32-bit DWORD value DisableHardwareAcceleration in the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Graphics\
A value of “1“ in DisableHardwareAcceleration forced MS Word to launch without an issue. If the described entry in the registry is already set before the Inplace Upgrade in Windows 7, the error does not occur under Windows 10, as Markus told me. This website describes how to deactivate the hardware acceleration on the user interface. Markus say:
Strange is: If the hardware acceleration is reactivated after the start in the extended Word options, the error DOES NOT occur again…..
Important: After setting the registry value and restarting the system, MS Office prompts for a “reactivation”, which can be waved through without entering a key using the online activation wizard….
In addition, the blog reader wrote me that the described behavior has occurred on a good dozen PCs with MS Office 2013 in various companies so far. Therefore Markus excludes that it could be due to the installation image or a certain system configuration. Maybe this information from Markus will helpful.