This is a way to be able to run office applications if they refuse to start giving you the error 0xc0000142.
Introduction
At home, we have the Office 365 family license installed in a Windows 10 Professional 64 bits system.
From time to time, when you click on any office application (Word, Excel, Outlook...) in the start menu, an orange splash screen appears alerting that is trying to update Office. When this happens, you know that after a few seconds, a message box will appear with the text:
OUTLOOK.EXE - Application Error
The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142).
Click OK to close the application.
* that message was given when trying to launch Outlook.
After searching the web, I tried a lot of assistants from Microsoft, and the only thing that worked fine was to reinstall Office, which was time consuming, but moreover, I really can't ask my mother to do this alone.
Well, at the end, I can't really remember where, I've found a good solution to this problem and I thought I would share it + keep it written here for further revision in case of need.
Background
You will need only to know how to create a file, to edit its text, to rename it and to create a shortcut to the same file.
Using the Code
The only thing that must be done is to restart the ClickToRunSvc service.
To make this convenient for a non tech savvy user, I have created a small bat file with this content:
net stop ClickToRunSvc
net start ClickToRunSvc
After that, I created a shortcut to the same batch file and checked the "execute as administrator" option.
If you get that message and your Office programs refuse to start, feel free to use this solution to get it solved by double clicking a shortcut.
History
- 2nd April, 2021: Initial version
