Office 2016 any open in Protected Mode fails with Corrupted File error

Hi TinNickels,

Thank you for providing a detailed information about your concern. Since you're still experiencing the issue after performing troubleshooting steps for the Office application, there is a possibility that this issue is related to the operating system.

If you have another user profile on your PC, we suggest using it for the meantime and check if the same issue persists. On the other hand, if you only have one user account on your PC, you can try creating another local user or administrator account to check if the same issue persists. For the steps on how to do this, kindly check the article: Create a local user or administrator account in Windows 10.

If you continue to have this issue even after performing the above steps, please reply to this thread. The system will notify us so we can get back to you and provide you more answers.

I tried this under a different local admin account and the results are the same. This was a virgin account, so this behavior doesn't seem specific to a single user profile or to any particular user profile settings.

Any other ideas??.

Thanks for the update. We appreciate your efforts in following our suggested troubleshooting steps.

In this case, I'll be coordinating with our Internal support team to get this addressed as soon as possible. Kindly provide us the following information:

• OS Name, Build, and Version of your device. See this article: Which Windows operating system am I running?
• Build and version of Office that you're using. See this article: About Office: What version of Office am I using?

We’ll let you know once we reach a resolution. Please standby.

If you have additional questions, please let us know by replying to this thread. This way, we'll get notified and respond back to you as soon as we can.

Thanks in advance for the help. The info you requested is below. Let me know if you need anything else.

Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Version 1809
Build 17763.253

Office 365 MSO (16.0.11126.20192) 32-bit

It's been 2 weeks. Any update on this??

FYI - in the meantime I tried doing a full manual uninstall of every version of Office that's ever been on the machine. Then did a clean reinstall of 365. The problem persists.

Hi TinNickels, 

Thank you for waiting. Also, for providing an additional information. Upon consulting with our Internal Support team, they suggest that it's best that you consult our Microsoft Answer Desk team through live chat or via phone call because they have the most effective tool to resolve your concern in real time.

Here are the links on how to contact them: 

• Live Chat
• Call 

Should you need further assistance, don't hesitate to contact us. 

I was finally able to resolve this. I had observed that on a working machine, Protected view launched an Excel child process which was the sandboxed Protected view window. On the problematic system, this child process never showed up.

Using the SysInternals Process Monitor, I logged the launch of an Excel file in Protected view. Then filtered the log for Excel.exe entries with an "ACCESS DENIED" result. There's a ton of registry events in there, but these did not seem to be causing any issue. They were also present in a normal Excel launch. However, there were 2 create file events for different DLL files that were unique to the Protected view launch. The inability to access one or more DLL files could certainly prevent a process from launching.

The two files were both in the C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ folder. Specifically, they were vcruntime140.dll and msvcp140.dll. I compared the file security permissions between a working system and my problematic system. The problem system was missing Read and Read/Execute privileges for the objects ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES and ALL RESTRICTED APPLICATION PACKAGES. I manually added the ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES object to each file. It defaulted to the right access privs, and after Apply the ALL RESTRICTED APPLICATION PACKAGES just showed up as added as well. (I'm not really sure why that happens, but in this case, it's just what you want.)

This fixed it immediately. Just relaunch Excel in Protected view and it works. My Outlook Previewers for Office docs are now working again as well. Hopefully this helps someone else or at least provides some useful breadcrumbs.

Thank you. You are a genius. I have tried everything until I found this. In my case I was missing both ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES and ALL RESTRICTED APPLICATION PACKAGES.

Fixed it with these commands:

icacls "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ msvcp140.dll " /grant *S-1-15-2-1:(OI)(CI)RX

icacls "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\msvcp140.dll" /grant *S-1-15-2-1:(OI)(CI)RX