Please see this thread: https://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/3d3d8fe6-cffd-424a-9e5b-2b5ab2f0436e/office-software-protection-platform-for-excel-in-hpc?forum=windowshpcdevs

With Excel 2013 installed on servers, is there any way to disable the Office Software Protection Platform from running each time Excel is invoked?

We start and stop Excel hundreds of times, often with multiple copies running, and having the licensing checks run each time is a problem.

We also are finding that Excel sometimes calls the "Microsoft Setup Bootstrapper" which blocks the process.

How can these two extra processes be turned off?

Hi Glen Little,

For disable Office Software Protection Platform, you can try to create and modify this registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform
ValueName: InactivityShutdownDelay
ValueType: DWORD

This will turn off service after it is not needed. You can enter the number of seconds you want service to stop after it is not needed any more.

For example, you can set to 5 seconds:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform
"InactivityShutdownDelay"=dword:00000005

For disable Microsoft Setup Bootstrapper, if there's no entry to uninstall it, then you can use Autoruns tool to stop it from trying to load at boot.

About Autoruns tool please refer to this article:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

Hope it's helpful.

Regards,

Emi Zhang
TechNet Community Su

Thanks Emi.

That wouldn't have helped much, as my goal was to prevent it from starting at all.

It turns out that if I run the process as a local administrator, the problem goes away. The setup program does not run each time.

• Marked as answer by Glen Little 8 hours 0 minutes ago