KB3176493 for Windows 10 and KB3177725 for Windows 7 broke printing in our software

Hi again Stefan-

After reviewing the details you provided, you may be able to work around this issue in your script by modifying the following chunk to retrieve a new Word object for each document:

Set objWord = CreateObject ("Word.Application")
[...]
objWord.WordBasic.FilePrintSetup "Microsoft XPS Document Writer", , , True

This should ensure a new DC is created each time and therefore avoid the problem.  Whether or not this is practical for you depends greatly on your circumstances- there could be a performance impact, the cost of making the changes may be prohibitively high, or distributing the solution to your end users/customers may be difficult or impossible.

That said, Microsoft is working to resolve- please stay tuned for further updates.

Take care,

Dan

Hi Kristjan-

We are aware of the difficult situation this places you in, which is why we have provided the workarounds we are aware of while the engineering team works to resolve this issue completely.  While I cannot share any target release dates, I can say the update will be released once the engineering team feels comfortable to do so.

Take care,

Dan

Hello Dan,

Thanks for your response.

Can you confirm this is indeed the same DC issue? The symptoms are subtly different as the second document is already broken. If not, do I need to log an incident report for this issue?

We are indeed proposing both options to our customers. Recycling Word instances is fortunately a configuration option in our product, but one that was intended for recovery (leaky PCL printer drivers in Windows NT), not for standard use.

The performance impact of restarting Word for _each_ print and the unavoidable overhead of printer setup which now has to be done for each print does have a tremendous impact. If I recall the logs correctly for the customer that reported the problem to us I estimate that each print will go from 100ms to 1200ms or more - claiming a full CPU core during this time.

I was starting to write a response on the 'whether or not practical' for our circumstances -- which are very 'enterprise' focused. However, that response got way too long and way too detailed for this public forum. Contact me directly if you want to discuss this.

We are urgently waiting for a formal statement on this issue that we can refer to customers. MS16-098 is a security fix so it is very hard to justify not deploying it; this tends to violate operational procedures and compliance requirements and that makes it hard to argue against deployment. There is a definite conflict of interests between business and IT here, and it helps to make an informed decision if it is known whether or not the effects of that choice will be temporary (this applies to delaying deployment as well as acceptance of a workaround with severe impact).

You are aware there are already quotes from an incident report with an explicit ETA date floating around?

Thanks,

Stefan

E: stefan(dot)ten[no-dot]hoedt(at)outlook(dot)com

KB3177725 also breaks the connection between Adobe Acrobat and Word, rendering it impossible to use Acrobat to convert Word files to PDFs under Windows 7. This is well-documented in this forum: https://forums.adobe.com/community/acrobat/creating__editing_&_exporting_pdfs/content. Most reports involve Word 2003, but I tested Word 2016 today and had the same result. This is a major problem.

Thank you Robin for reporting this.

We are tracking this issue and it as been shared with the appropriate teams.  Once a fix is publicly available, I will share a link to it here.

Thanks,

Dan

Thank you Robin for reporting this.

We are tracking this issue and it as been shared with the appropriate teams.  Once a fix is publicly available, I will share a link to it here.

Thanks,

Dan

Hi,

In our organization we tested the solution proposed by Rafael Diplod in this post https://plus.google.com/+PaulTOTH/posts/jTQtLWA4RN5 and it works perfect in Win7 with KB3177725 and Win10 with KB3176493 installed.

GBorn-

I cannot comment on the potential release dates other than to say the engineering team is working to resolve this completely as quickly as possible.

CristianApas-

Thank you for validating and sharing the workaround above.

Take care,
Dan

How is this 'workaround' implemented?  I really hope they get this fixed soon!  I have a staff accountant that can't print multiple pages of deposit slips from Print Boss (Wellspring Software).  Thank the gods she is the only one having the issue!

Thank you!

Larry