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How to Troubleshoot Outlook Add-in Issues
Posted by Kevin Merta on 17 August 2011 05:10 PM

Step 1 – Check Version

Make sure you are running our latest version.  There is also a known issue with Office 2007 or earlier if a component of Office 2010 such as Visio, Project or Excel is installed.  See KB Article.

If you are having issues crashes on the Calendar pane, 64 bit versions of Outlook, or the Batch Pre-registration, please upgrade to version 10.3.15 or later. If you are cloud, you will be able to download the latest version from the link before. If you on On-premise, make sure you only download up to your servers version(which you can see as the Database version in the settings).

 

Step 2 – Disable all other Add-ins And Make Sure the EIOBoard Add-in is enabled

There may be a conflict with other add-ins that are being loaded in the Office application. Disable all other Add-Ins except the one in question and retry.  You can either use the Manage Add-ons button in Outlook or make registry changes to the LoadBehavior typically found in one of these keys: (make the LoadBehavior = 3 for subkeys EIOBoard Outlook Addin and EIOBoard Outlook Addin Ext and LoadBehavior = 0 for the rest):

  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\AddIns

You can also make sure that Outlook isn't disabling EIOBoard at the same time by clearing out the entries in:

  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\1x.0\Outlook\Resiliency\DisabledItems
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\1x.0\Outlook\Resiliency\CrashingAddinList

and Adding a dword entry called 'Savance.EIOBoard Outlook Add-in x64' with a value of 1 under-

  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\1x.0\Outlook\Resiliency\DoNotDisableAddinList

Where '1x.0' represents your current version of Outlook.

Checking the Disabled Add-ins list in Outlook for each version

Setting the EIOBoard Add-in to not disable in the registry

 

Step 3 - Outlook Add-in shows pencil icon in task tray, but nothing in Outlook

If the Outlook Add-in is installed and the pencil icon is showing up in the task tray, but the Add-in menus and main view are not appearing in Outlook, you may have multiple instances of Outlook open. The Outlook Add-in will only display in the first instance that was opened.

You can check if you have multiple instances of Outlook open in a couple of different ways. The easiest check is to see if you have multiple Outlook windows on your Taskbar. If so, close the duplicates and retain just the window that displays the EIOBoard Outlook Add-in.

If you only see one window but still have this issue, you may have "Hide when minimized" checked on your task tray icon. Right-click on the Outlook icon in the task tray (by the clock) and uncheck "Hide when minimized". This will place all instances of Outlook back into the Taskbar. Again, close the duplicates and only retain the first instance, which should be displaying the EIOBoard Outlook Add-in. When you minimize Outlook now, it should remain in the Taskbar instead of disappearing.

 

Step 4 - Disable or Uninstall all Antivirus Programs

The Antivirus on the system may be blocking the Add-In load. Run latest updates for the Antivirus and retry. If this doesn’t help, disable the Antivirus program completely and retry. Sometimes the Antivirus software also installs additional Office add-in, you may need to disable these additionally by running through the Antivirus control panel (Settings). Here is one

such KB article that talks about Norton Antivirus: How to use Office programs with the Norton AntiVirus Office plug-in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329820

 

Step 5 – Repair Office

Open Add/Remove Programs and look for "Microsoft Office...". Right click this and select "Change". A window will pop up that allows you to repair Office. This may take sometime, but it can fix any corruption that has occurred in DLL files or Registry keys that EIOBoard depends on.

 

Step 6 – Try uninstalling the EIOBoard Outlook Add-in and Dependent Tools

  • Uninstall EIOBoard Add-in and all versions of VSTO in the add/remove programs
  • Restart PC
  • Reinstall EIOBoard Enable the add-in or change its behavior to start up.
  • If it still does not load, try manually installing the VSTO dependencies:

Office 2010
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42513

Office 2007 or earlier:
http://support.savance.com/index.php?group=eioboard&_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=73

If it still does not load, try manually installing the Office Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs)

Office 2010 PIA
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=3508

Office 2007 PIA
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=18346

Office 2003 PIA
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=20923

Office XP PIA
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=227

 

Step 7 – Configure your environment to see Add-in Errors

Visual Studio Tools for Office can write all errors that occur during startup to a log file or display each error in a message box. By default, these options are turned off. You can turn the options on by adding and setting environment variables.

Configure Office to Display Add-in Load Issues in a Message Box

To show the details of any run-time errors that occur during the loading of an Add-in, set the VSTO_SUPPRESSDISPLAYALERTS environment variable to 0.  You may need to add “VSTO_SUPPRESSDISPLAYALERTS=0” to your environment variables if it does not exist.

Configure Office to Log Add-in Load Issues to a File

To write the errors to a log file, set the VSTO_LOGALERTS environment variable to 1 (one).  Visual Studio Tools for Office creates the log file in the folder that contains the application manifest. The default name is <Manifestname>.manifest.log. To stop logging errors, set the variable to 0 (zero).

Tip: For information about setting environment variables in Microsoft Windows XP, see "How To Manage Environment Variables in Windows XP" (http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;310519).

 

Step 8 - Enable the Fusion Log for additional information The fusion log will give you extremely detailed info about VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) components as they attempt to run.  To enable Fusion logs, you can either make registry entries to enable logging or try to use the “Assembly Binding Log Viewer” (fuslogvw) .NET framework tool. Using the Registry Here are the registry entries that need to be made:

  1. Open regedit and browse to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion”
  2.  Create a DWORD value by name “EnableLog” and set its value to 1.
  3. Create a DWORD value by name “ForceLog” and set its value to 1.
  4. Create a DWORD value by name “LogFailures” and set its value to 1.
  5. Create a String value by name “LogPath” and set its value to “c:\Fusion”
  6. Create the folder “c:\Fusion”

Using the Assembly Binding Log Viewer (GUI)

Run fuslogvw.exe from %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft.Net\SDK\v2.0\bin, click Settings, select Log all binds to disk, and  click Ok.  Try to load your Add-in. Then click the refresh button in the Log Viewer.  Check the log to see where Fusion is looking for things and see if that gives you any hints.

After reproducing the issue, launch Outlook with the Environment variable VSTO_SUPPRESSDISPLAYALERTS=0 discussed above to get even more information in the Message Box Prompt or look at each of the files created under “C:\Fusion\ Default \<Application.exe>\” folder. Fix any failures and retry.

To learn more about Assembly Binding Log Viewer (fuslogvw), please refer: Assembly Binding Log Viewer (Fuslogvw.exe) http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e74a18c4(VS.80).aspx

 

Step 9 - Delete the Registry Keys and Reinstall: If you're getting the error "Column 'Success' does not belong to table Table.", it usually means a newer version of the Outlook Add-in than your server was installed.

If a newer version of EIOboard is installed on a machine, those registry keys are left on the machine(since uninstalling doesn't remove registry keys because Outlook saves them, and only upgrading replaces them, not downgrading).

So to manually remove the Registry Keys for the Add-in, you have to find it's entries in Regedit and manually delete them after uninstalling:

  • Uninstall EIOBoard Outlook Add-in
  • Go into the registry keys (open regedit) at both

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins
and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\AddIns

  • Delete the registry keys for both installs(any folders with EIOboard or Savance.EIOBoard in the title)
  • Afterwards reinstalling just the version for your server works as only the registry keys for the correct version will be installed with it.

The Version Number installed is also kept in the Registry Key at Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Savance\EIOBoard Outlook Add-in

 

Developer-Guided Troubleshooting

  1. Make sure you have the correct version of .NET framework installed and working properly.  Sometimes a repair or uninstall/reinstall of the.NET framework, VSTO, or PIA is required.
  2. Make sure you have Office Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) installed on the target machine. You can check this by going to the Global Assembly Cache, GAC, (%systemroot%\assembly) and looking for assemblies beginning with “Microsoft.Office”. To know more about PIAs, please refer: Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) and Interop Assemblies (IAs) http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa169585.aspx For Office 2007 PIAs http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=59daebaa-bed4-4282-a28c-b864d8bfa513&displaylang=en For Office 2010 PIAs http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=3508 3.       
  3. Make sure the user has correct permissions to the manifest and associated files for the add-in.

References:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/haahmadi/archive/2010/05/26/my-vsto-add-in-does-not-load.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsod/archive/2008/04/22/troubleshooting-com-add-in-load-failures.aspx http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4668777/how-to-troubleshoot-a-vsto-addin-that-does-not-load