Software bugs are an everyday occurrence. With the increasing complexity of many modern programs in today's feature-packed applications, it is only natural that at some point something will go down. However, if the primary purpose of an app is to handle text, one would hope that a simple act of typing would not cause the app to terminate.

According to Microsoft, this exact issue affects certain installations of Outlook, Word, and OneNote, and the Outlook and Office teams are currently investigating (via Neowin). In a support post, MS defines the issue as follows:

“After updating to [Office] version 2407 build 17830.20138 or later, Outlook, Word, or OneNote, while typing or performing other authoring tasks such as spell checking may close unexpectedly while typing or performing other authoring tasks such as spell-checking.

Yes, simply typing text or performing a spell check can cause the application to close. Microsoft confirms this problem by searching for event 1000 or event 1001 in the Windows Event Viewer application log and states that the problem may be caused by an old language pack:

“The module name that causes the failure is depends on the language pack installed. For example, mscss7it.dll for Italian, mscss7ge.dll for German, etc.: en, es, fr, ge, it, np, pb”

Currently, MS advises workarounds that include online repair of affected Office applications, searching for and uninstalling old Office languages, and reinstalling Microsoft 365 language accessory packs.

Affected users are also directed to a Microsoft forum thread. In this thread, several users have reported that simply typing, saving drafts, and typing different languages in both the Windows version and the Android application causes the Outlook installation to crash.

Many of the users in this thread report that they were typing (or spell checking) German when the problem occurred, but from the support post, it appears that MS believes that multiple languages can cause the affected app to quit.

Not that I can send emails with what I internally call “Ol' Reliable” apps, but I'll note one for the notepad. Still, it has a surprisingly good spell check and multiple useful features these days, and I have yet to have one crash while taking notes. Sometimes the classics are the best.