Outlook 2016 and chart.dll error (multiple PCs)

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In the last two weeks, 5 out of roughly 20 PCs in my office workgroup have started experiencing an error with Outlook 2016, where opening emails in the Inbox, switching to calendar view, or even starting a new email will pop up the older/common error

“The required file chart.dll cannot be found in your path. Install Microsoft Outlook again.”

We do not use Chart Controls for Microsoft .Net which is the typical source for chart.dll, we do use a .Net click-to-run application but it does not interact with Outlook, and we install VSTOR (Vis. Studio Tools for Office Runtime) to support that program.

It only occurs in Outlook and does not affect the rest of the office suite. Restarting Outlook or the PC will temporarily resolve the issue but it will eventually recur. Reinstalling Office did not resolve the issue, it re-occurred.

Our environment is Windows 10, we have both machines with 1903 and 1909 experiencing the issue. They are domain-joined and outlook connects to a local Exchange server but everything is locally installed and there are not special path variables set for the user accounts.

I had a machine that came out of an update pause Monday and started experiencing the issue today, so I am assuming it is being caused by a certain Windows Update but I cannot isolate which one and I haven’t seen other reports of the issue on the web either.

Anyone have any experience with this or can provide guidance about which update might have triggered this?

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woody

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32-bit or 64-bit Office?

If 32-bit, what’s the date/timestamp on the copy of chart.dll in
c:\program files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16?

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32 Bit (16.0.4266.1001)

Chart.dll (and most files in that folder)  are  dated: July 31, 2015

Our environment is unchanged since roughly October 2017 outside of the normal updates, and I have not encountered this error.

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No recent patches applied, I guess. We’re running 2016 on Windows 10 (mostly 1903) – version number here is 16.0.4966.1000 and the datestamp on my chart.dll is 10/16/2019.

Would it be worth a try reinstalling .Net Chart controls? The download is here – maybe it’ll just overwrite what you have out there and start working properly.

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A few apparently solved it by adding the chart.dll folder to their PATH environment variable:

2016 Outlook has error message Required file chart.dll not found in your path Outlook Crashes [closed]

Might be quicker than trying to figure out what changed for it to be needed.

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leland, woody

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Interesting. That problem on StackOverflow is from three years ago. I don’t see any definitive source of the problem….

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We don’t have Chart Tools installed, though something obviously installs it since the file is there. I may try deploying it out anyway to see if it works.

Before that I am pushing out all of the missing Office updates, the two machines I could get quick hands on both had “Other MS Product updates” disabled for some reason so a thorough patching may do the trick.

I had read about the Path changes a bit but it didn’t seem to exactly apply since it seems to solve the “failure to launch” case of the error; It may come to trying that out, but I’d rather not risk it as a bandaid solution until I have exhausted everything else.

Thanks for the help so far, I’ll update as I discover more.

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I also have the issue, with 2 customers. I you uninstall mcafee virusscanner (10.6  endpoint protection) problem is resolved. On mcafee site nothing to find. Now I need to find what exactly in mcafee I have to turn off.

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leland, D Hensley

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Another thing was reproducing the issue.

• Outlook with a preview pane.
• Close outlook
• Start outlook
• click on 2 email and view them.
• Then click on sent items folder
• popup chart.dll error, outlook crashes.

Workaround temporary

• Close outlook
• Open outlook
• Click immediately in Sent Items folder ( Do not click on any email item in inbox)
• After that you can click everywere in outloook

Credit Peter-Frank Lemmens (LENESO.BE)

 

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jch75, leland, woody, Elly, D Hensley

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This was the only solution working for me, so far !

I have checked the PATH, uninstalled McAfee Web Control, repaired Office 2016, no luck.

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anonymous wrote:

I also have the issue, with 2 customers. I you uninstall mcafee virusscanner (10.6  endpoint protection) problem is resolved. On mcafee site nothing to find. Now I need to find what exactly in mcafee I have to turn off.

Aha! We also use Mcafee Endpoint 10.6. It will have to be Threat Prevention I think, *maybe* Web Control if it interacts with Outlook somehow; because we do not deploy the Firewall product to some machines on the internal network and 2 of those machines were having the issue.

 

I can also confirm that your reproduction steps and workaround work here as well. I  would note that I can no longer cause the issue to occur on the machine in my office that I fully patched with Outlook updates (now running 16.0.4966.1000) but it wasn’t reliably producing the error like the live cases I have, so I can’t confirm that Outlook patches helps yet.

Thanks for the update, I’ll also begin investigating McAfee for specifics.

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On Twitter…

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D Hensley

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Further to my Twitter comment, we support a few thousand PCs running Mcafee ENS 10.6.1 and 10.7. My PC is one of the few which has the Feb build of ENS 10.7, and I think that I’m the only one who who has seen it (I’ll check with my desktop support colleagues tomorrow). If it’s only ENS users seeing it, build numbers could be important.

Phil

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D Hensley, woody

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Ok first I want to thank you all for posting, it has been a tremendous help in our troubleshooting. It appears to be McAfee web-control that is causing the problem. Using the trigger method described above we have been able to replicate the problem 100% of the time. Then we took a look at it in procmon and McAfee was the last thing churning away before the office error reporting tool started. So we uninstalled mcafee piece by piece until we could not reproduce the error. Web control was the last to go. Then we took a clean system and installed web control and the error came back. Finally, we installed every thing but web control and the error still has not come back. We are now going to try this solution on some of the machines having problems in our environment and see what happens. Will keep you informed.

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I am also experiencing this issue spreading across a 3,500 user environment. Building off the notes I have found here, it appears to be Endpoint Security Web Control 10.7.0.1306 that is causing the chart.dll issue.  Also I am noticing Microsoft.VbaAddinForOutlook.1 plugin is loaded before the error can occur.  I will work with my colleagues to continue testing tomorrow.

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D Hensley

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We had the same issuses .. the solution was:
You have to uninstall the Endpoint Suite completely (by using McAfee Endpoint Product Removal) and then reinstall it without using the february update files!

These McAfee Endpoint Version are safe (not causing the chart-dll error in Outlook):

Plattform: 10.7.0.1085

Threat Prevention: 10.7.0.1415

WebControl: 10.7.0.1086

Richard Hasiba
FH Joanneum GmbH
IT Support

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D Hensley

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I’ve started a thread on this issue on the McAfee ENS forum:

https://community.mcafee.com/t5/Endpoint-Security-ENS/Outlook-2016-and-chart-dll-error/m-p/651239

Let’s see if other corporate users are having the problem.

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D Hensley

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Uninstalling “Web Control” from the client machine via Windows’ program manager did stop the error here, despite what a user in the McAfee thread said, so it does seem to be Web Control causing the issue.

We can’t deploy 10.7 yet because McAfee hasn’t released it onto ‘Cloud ePO’ which is how we manage Endpoint, rather than on-premises. I suppose I’ll have to open a ticket with them to see how long they’re going to wait.

Thanks again for the help, everyone. Hopefully a firm solution can be found. Between Windows’ ‘Wild West Updates’ and McAfee, my hair is going grey.

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b

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For those running McAfee Web Control, try the below

Please try duplicating the “Options” policy under Web Control and apply it only on the specific machine which you are testing.

Click on show advanced and disable the below option under “Email Annotations    (Windows only)”

Enable annotations in non browser-based email

I did this and the issue was resolved. I still have my case open with McAfee and they’ve escalated to engineering for them ti see why this isn’t working as expected

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https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB92671

https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB82450

Issue: You might encounter either of the following issues.

• When using Outlook, a pop-up error message might display stating that the file chart.dll is missing. Clicking OK in the pop-up message causes Outlook to close and relaunch.
• Webpages with ActiveX might fail to load in Internet Explorer.

Resolution: This issue is resolved in ENS 10.6.1 July 2020 Update and ENS 10.7.0 July 2020 Update. See the related article for more information.

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