We have Office 2013 ProPlus installed on 10 virtual Citrix XenApp 6.5 servers running Win2k8r2.

Our users start a published Desktop and do all their work.

When they try opening a password protected Excel 2013 file by double clicking it, it doesn't load. It loads Excel to begin with but it stops at the green Excel 2013 splash screen saying "Bearbetar..." (swedish for processing) in the lower left corner of the splash screen. I have to go in and kill the Excel.exe process for the user(s). My gut feeling is that this is happening because the small password popup window before the file is loaded isn't shown/visible/loaded. Why? Because once I've killed the process and the user opens that password protected file again, Excel is loaded correctly but a popup saying something like "there was a problem opening this file the last time, want to try to open it anyway?". When the user click "Yes" the password popup is shown and the file is loaded.

Opening up Excel first and then double clicking the file works, as does browsing for the file inside Excel.

Normal Excel files without password protection works fine.

Same thing happens when I am logged on with full admin rights on ALL 10 servers to the console session, so it's not related to Citrix.

Tried excel.exe /unregserver and /regserver without any change.

Heeeeelp! :)

/P-H

Tried to repair the Office installation on one server that was removed from the Citrix farm.

Restarted the server after the repair process was run but it did not solve the problem.

After some more troubleshooting I noticed that Event ID 1001 from MsiInstaller was added to the Application log every time I started Excel on the server.
It said something like "The identification of the product {yadda-yadda}, function PDFMaker failed the request from component {yadda-yadda-2}" (poorly translated from Swedish).

So I went in and disabled the Acrobat PDFMaker COM plug in from Excel... and voil; problem gone.

Now I just need to find out why Acrobats PDFMaker is messing with the core functions of Excel.

F**king Adobe. :)

• Marked as answer by PHGustavsson 19 hours 51 minutes ago

After some more troubleshooting I noticed that Event ID 1001 from MsiInstaller was added to the Application log every time I started Excel on the server.
It said something like "The identification of the product {yadda-yadda}, function PDFMaker failed the request from component {yadda-yadda-2}" (poorly translated from Swedish).

So I went in and disabled the Acrobat PDFMaker COM plug in from Excel... and voil; problem gone.

Now I just need to find out why Acrobats PDFMaker is messing with the core functions of Excel.

F**king Adobe. :)

• Marked as answer by PHGustavsson Tuesday, May 05, 2015 11:43 AM

Thank you so much for this I have tired everything till I found this post.

But I had to disable both COM Add-Ins: MS Power Map for Excel and SMARTInk-Excell-All