Microsoft pulls Outlook 2013 patch

This week was the monthly Patch Tuesday, a time when Microsoft sees fit to push out updates to various software, most notably Windows and Office. Its a tense time, thanks to past problems that have resulted in unbootable computers for some customers. This month did not cause anything quite so drastic, but it also did not pass without notice.

The company pushed a patch for Outlook 2013, but quickly had to pull that particular update from the set due to reports of customers having issues with KB2817630, which was a non-security update.

The problem arose from a version incompatibility between outlook.exe and mso.dll, a mismatched reference to a data structure causes the “minimize” button in the navigation pane to render incorrectly, typically by appearing extremely large to the point that the navigation pane is “invisible” to the user. The issue only appears when incompatible versions of outlook.exe and mso.dll exist on the system.

Not all versions of the latest Outlook for Office were affected:

Affected

• Office 2013 Standard
• Office 2013 Professional Plus

Not Affected

• Office 2013 Home & Student
• Office 2013 Home & Business
• Office 2013 Professional
• Office 365 Home Premium
• Office 365 Professional Plus
• Office 365 University
• Office 365 Small Business Premium
• Office 365 ProPlus
• Office 365 Enterprise

Microsoft promises that it is “working on re-publishing the September Public Update with the correct versions of both mso.dll and outlook.exe to ensure users with automatic updates enabled will receive the correct fix. We will update this blog with further information as our schedule develops”.