windows 7 - Outlook 2010 crashes when viewing mail with Japanese text

I have a user whose Outlook 2010 (32-bit) client crashes when attempting to view mail with Japanese text in the body. The client crashes both when I use the reading pane and when I try to open the message without the reading pane. The user is running 64-bit Windows 7 Professional.

This is what showed up in the Application log at first:

Faulting application name: OUTLOOK.EXE, version: 14.0.6126.5003, time stamp: 0x505b1685

Faulting module name: riched20.dll, version: 14.0.6015.1000, time stamp: 0x4d1933c2

Exception code: 0xc0000005

Fault offset: 0x0001dcc0

Faulting process id: 0xecc

Faulting application start time: 0x01cdc6f530bbbd29

Faulting application path: C:\PROGRA~2\MIF5BA~1\Office14\OUTLOOK.EXE

Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\office14\riched20.dll

Report Id: 12c33f72-32f2-11e2-ad30-f0def1549eda

So I renamed riched20.dll and repaired Office. It got replaced, but the log entry for each crash looks now like this:

Faulting application name: OUTLOOK.EXE, version: 14.0.6126.5003, time stamp: 0x505b1685

Faulting module name: unknown, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x00000000

Exception code: 0xc000041d

Fault offset: 0x745f4c4f

Faulting process id: 0x17b8

Faulting application start time: 0x01cdc795daf5b339

Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\OUTLOOK.EXE

Faulting module path: unknown

Report Id: abc57e29-3389-11e2-86b6-f0def1549eda

I've tried:

• Rebooting (of course)


• Repairing Office


• Removing and reinstalling Office


• Running Outlook in safe mode


• Removing the antivirus client temporarily

No luck so far. Any ideas?

Answer

RichEd20.DLL is the library which enables Rich Text Editing within Outlook. Based on exception code 0xc000041d (unhandled exception in user callback, maybe a null pointer exception), it's safe to say the repair failed spectacularly probably by not linking the new library correctly.

The initial exception, 0xc0000005, is an access violation within the library. This leads me to believe that there may have been a corruption in the language display support for the OS itself rather than only Outlook. Re-imaging a machine would solve this of course... An alternative is to "trick" the machine into re-initializing its language display settings by changing its locale

As an aside, if this comes up with a character set that's not natively supported within windows, a re-install of the Language Interface Pack or LIP may solve the issue as well.