M365 Office apps crashing on open

[HCHTech]

This is a fully-patched Win10 22H2 workstation, and all office apps are crashing shortly after opening. For Outlook, it connects and retrieves new mail, but the app closes about 30 seconds after starting. For Word & Excel, they will sit at the open screen waiting for you to either create a new document or open an existing document, but once you make that choice, the file opens and then the app crashes several seconds later.

After an initial crash, opening the app again gets the "do you want to run in safe mode" prompt, but choosing to do so doesn't change the behavior. So it's not an add-in.

The application log shows an error 1000 for each crashing app with the faulting module v8jsi.dll. I tried reregistering this file, but get an error there "the module was loaded but the entry point DllRegisterServer was not found - Make sure v8jsi.dll is a valid OCS or DLL file.

So far, I have:

• Run a "quick" repair from control panel - no help
• Run an "online" repair from control panel- no help
• Downloaded and run the SaRA tool, no help, although it did an uninstall and reinstall of the Office suite
• Uses the SaRA tool to completely remove office, reboot & check for leftover folders, files, reg entries, scheduled tasks & click-to-run service. All were successfully removed. Then did a reboot and fresh install after logging on to M365. - no help
• Ran a virus scan (managed BitDefender) - nothing detected (also checked the quarantine for anything detected recently, nothing found)
• disabled AV & EDR - no help
• Ran a threat scan with Malwarebytes EDR, nothing detected
• Tried replacing the v8jsi.dll file with one from a workstation at this same client where office was working correctly - no help
• searching for this error turns up "v8jsi.dll is missing" errors, but none matching my situation.

Signing in as a different user, then logging into the office apps as the original user makes things work, so this is some kind of corruption in the user profile, but I'm hesitant to start down that path since it's a domain account. Is there anything I forgot from my list above before I go through the nonsense of deleting the domain profile?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Odd one.
I see you narrowed it down to the user profile. Which...shouldn't be terrible to rebuild.
Quick google-fu led to a thread where many users shared McAfee...did that happen to get installed by the end user?
Some other peeps had luck copying that vs8ji.dll from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16 and pasting into C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16 as well as into C:\Windows\SysWOW64. But that works against your user profile diagnosis.

 

[Markverhyden]

Is the date and time correct. What happens if you log in as the target user on another machine?

 

[Metanis]

Three thoughts... user running User or Admin level? Any recently installed software or apps that messed with JavaScript? Did the machine get the new Edge update that promised enhanced Domain capabilities?

 

[HCHTech]

Time & Date were indeed correct. User was admin to local machine. Don't know about the Edge update. No McAfee software - we remove that &^%* on site when it is detected by our RMM.

I ended up backing up the local data, unjoining the computer from the domain, deleting both the local account and domain account, then running DISM against a fresh 22H2 ISO, followed by SFC, complete removal of MS Office (again), removing the previous computer account from AD, then rejoining the computer to the domain, logging back onto M365 and installing the Office Apps fresh. Still exhibited the same symptom.

I found a spare workstation and added the poor worker's account to that, everything works fine. I don't know what in the *7&$ is wrong with the original workstation, but it's 5 years old now so I don't think I'll even waste another second on it.

The only unusual thing about this account is the user got married at some point and her AD account had a name change - I know that's probably not related, but it's the only thing I could come up with that made this user different from any of the others. No software was installed recently (other than Windows updates - they are on patch management). No other users have reported this symptom - I got nothin'. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯