Re-enabling Microsoft Word Add-In after Error

user_4046585 0
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We are developing a COM Add-In for Microsoft Word (only local, not for cloud usage). One of our customers had the problem, that each time he started Word, he had to manually activate the Add-In (Word Options > Add-Ins > Go... > tick the checkbox for the corresponding Add-In). I could reproduce this behavior by forcing an error in the Add-In coding which caused Word to crash. When starting Word the next time, I got the following message: Error Message

Of course I saw this message several times before. But: back then the consequence of clicking on "Yes" was that the Add-In was disabled. In that case it was sufficient to re-enable it one time (as described above). The next time the Add-In was started, you didn't have to enable it any more.

But now, additionally to disabling the Add-In, there is a registry key created. That key has the name of the Add-In and is located at the following path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Office/15.0/Word/AddInLoadTimes.

Registry Keys

And it seems that this key causes the behavior described at the beginning. Because if I delete the key, start Word, enable the Add-In, close word, set the "LoadBehavior" key in the registry to "3" and then restart word, everything is fine again.

Now my question: is there a user-friendly alternative to enable the Add-In? Since the fewest of our users have administrative privileges, we cannot ask them to change some registry keys in order to fix the problem.

I hope that someone can help me with this.

Best regards

Timo

office-addins word-addins vsto ms-word c#
3 Answers

The path we took to avoid this issue, was to check in the code any static initialize methods / properties (which are invoked when word tries to activates the addin), which potentially could throw exceptions (IO work, REST api requests ... etc) and added to them try / catch blogs with some notification to the user that the activation of the addin failed + logging of the exception.

Side Note: At the time we have struggled the same issue we could not find anything but the registry key which you have mention to resolve this behaviour, but we faced the same security restriction, so this was not an option.

user_52320500

Not knowing much about your add-in, I can think of 2 possibilities:

Since the registry key is in HKCU (which is normally fairly accessible) why not create a 2nd 'helper add-in' that checks for problems with this key and resets it when required?

Otherwise you could use Inno Setup to create a dummy installer that does this for you?

I think this is possible because your target location is HKEY_CURRENT_USER/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Office/15.0/Word/AddInLoadTimes (i.e. HKCU) which usually can be modified without admin rights: Changing registry without admin rights

user_34511150

Solution seems to go to Options > AddIns, then click GO aside Word Add-ins:

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Then select desired one and click ENABLE/DISABLE.

user_23773430
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