Windows 7,10 KB3178690 causes Excel 2010 to crash, fix incoming

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This month’s Patch Tuesday edition brought a series of important updates to all Windows versions, fixing a long list of known issues. Just as it happens with many Windows cumulative updates, users also discovered that some of the March Patch Tuesday patches also brought issues of their own.

As a quick reminder, the main Windows 10 cumulative update of this month, KB4013429 caused install issues, broke VPN connections, and crippled the Windows DVS player app.

Recent reports have also revealed that tool-specific updates also cause various bugs. Thousands of users reported that update KB3178690 caused Microsoft Excel to freeze and crash on Windows 7, 8.1 and Windows 10.

Excel crashes after users installed KB3178690

Here’s how one user describes this issue:

KB3178690 causing excel 2010 to crash
have had to remove this update from approx. 4 machines (3x Win7, 1x Win10) this morning as Excel 2010 kept crashing out when trying to update SQL queries.
Just wondered if anyone else has had any problems with this update and if there was another solution rather than removal of the update.

The good news is that Microsoft has officially acknowledged this bug and confirmed its engineers are working on a fix.

Issue summary: After installing KB3178690 in Excel 2010, calculation triggered either by code or user interaction in the workbook may result in a hang or crash. We released KB3178690 on March 14.

We are urgently working on a fix and I will keep this thread updated when we have more information.

For the time being, the only solution to fix the annoying Excel 2010 crashes is to simply uninstall the update. Hopefully, Microsoft will roll out a hotfix in the coming days.

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More about the topics: Excel, windows updates