Exploit freezes all Office 365 apps

[ingber]

Our Office 365 apps were freezing, much worse on my wife's PC where she could do no work at all.  I spent a couple of hours doing desktop and online repairs, and finally called Office 365 Support.  The support lady spent an hour+ with us, uninstalling and reinstalling Office, rebooting multiple times.  I finally agreed to let her log in remotely.  She fished around just as I did -- still the same problems.  She asked if we had Norton products on our PCs -- No -- and said Malwarebytes was fine.

Well, Malwarebytes was not so fine.  I got the idea to disable the Office products in Exploit (see uploaded image).  Now everything works just fine on both Thinkpads x64 Win10 Pro Creator.

I attach logs from my wife's PC.  I had to delete the two .bak files to meet the max size limits.

logs.zip

[nikhils]

Hello @ingber

Another suggestion would be to turn on the Protection for the Microsoft Office Applications but to add exclusions for the files.

You can Manually add exclusions under the Settings/Exclusions tab.

Thank you.

[ingber]

Now it appears that Exploit also is preventing our Chrome Extension Lastpass from running, regularly canceling it.  LP support looked over my logs and that is what they conclude.

 

So, I have turned off Chrome (& Plugins) in Anti-Exploit, and I'll see how that goes.

Edited April 5, 2017 by ingber

[Sneaky]

Thanks for posting this ingber. I have had exactly tthe same problem and have been searching for a solution everywhere for some time. Even tried a reinstall of Office 365. When clicking on an access, publisher, word or excel file, the application hangs. I then have to go to the task manager and end the task. The file then loads perfectly if I load it a second time and the Office applications work for the rest of the session until I shutdown. Extremely annoying.Turning off the protection for Microsoft Office in Malwarebytes solved the problem. Hooray!

Edited April 5, 2017 by Sneaky

[ingber]

2 hours ago, Sneaky said:

Thanks for posting this ingber. I have had exactly tthe same problem and have been searching for a solution everywhere for some time. Even tried a reinstall of Office 365. When clicking on an access, publisher, word or excel file, the application hangs. I then have to go to the task manager and end the task. The file then loads perfectly if I load it a second time and the Office applications work for the rest of the session until I shutdown. Extremely annoying.Turning off the protection for Microsoft Office in Malwarebytes solved the problem. Hooray!

Hi.  I just had to turn off Anti-Exploit for my Office 365 apps (see .jpg in my posting).

Lester

[ingber]

9 hours ago, ingber said:

Now it appears that Exploit also is preventing our Chrome Extension Lastpass from running, regularly canceling it.  LP support looked over my logs and that is what they conclude.

 

So, I have turned off Chrome (& Plugins) in Anti-Exploit, and I'll see how that goes.

Turning off Chrome (& Plugins) had no effect on the LP problem, so I conclude that the LP Support just was not correct for me.

[dcollins]

This is currently a known issue with some Office applications. Turning off protection for the Office applications is the best solution at this point.

[lmod]

I also had a problem with Malwarebytes 3.0.6 and Office 365 apps. Both on Windows 10 Version 1703 (build 15063.138  on my Surface Pro 4 and on the Windows 10 Insider Preview on my 'home-brew' desktop. As far as i can ascertain this problem began with the upgrade to Office 365 Version 1702 (Build 7870.2038). I therefore suspect that there is a change in that build that doesn't play nice with Malwarebytes.

Symptom: Opening Word, Excel or Publisher,then using the 'Open" function to browse to a file to open it results in the Office app going in a "Not responding" state. The app has to be closed, as it doesn't recover. Using File Explorer to locate the file and opening it from there opens the file, no hangs, until an attempt is made to save. So the issue occurs when browsing within the app to open, save, save as, etc

This error message seems to be constant, whichever app is in (attempted) use.

HardwareMonitorWindow: WINWORD.EXE - Application Error

The exception unknown software exception (0xe0000002) occurred in the application at location 0x0000000075626782.

 

I have uninstalled Malwarebytes, and now have no problems with the Office 365 apps.

I will experiment with setting up exclusions when I have some free time, but a modifying Malwarebytes to avoid this problem would be a better solution!

 

[arm1001]

On 4/5/2017 at 10:55 AM, dcollins said:

This is currently a known issue with some Office applications. Turning off protection for the Office applications is the best solution at this point.

I noticed elsewhere here (another locked thread) that the problem was resolved with the latest update.  Unfortunately that has not be resolved in my case - I'm still getting Office 365 programs (Excel, Word) freezing and closing.  Just thought I'd advise that there still are unresolved issues.

[nikhils]

Hello @arm1001

The latest 3.1.2.1733 does have some AE fixes. Are you running our latest build?

https://downloads.malwarebytes.org/file/mb3

If you are still seeing issues on the latest build please try this:

1. Go to Settings/Protection

2. Click on Advanced Settings next to managed protected applications.

3. In advanced settings uncheck the "BottomUp ASLR enforcement" for MS Word. (It is checked by default, please uncheck it)

We do have a fix for this issue in the MBAE stand alone it has just not made it into the 3.1.2 release but should be in our next CU.

Thank you,

 

 

[arm1001]

I'll try that and let you know.  I did download version 3.1.2 several days ago and installed it, but when I look at the installed version it says 3.0.6.1469, Component package 1.0.103, update package 1.0.2026

Did the new update not "take"?  I should have mentioned that I have MB Premium.  Thanks.

[nikhils]

Sounds good,

Run the latest installer to install 3.1.2. If you still see the issue please try the work around I mentioned.

Let us know if you are still seeing the issue.

Thank you.

[arm1001]

I just noticed elsewhere that there is  a "clean" tool to wipe out my existing version.  I ran that, then installed the newest upgrade.  Now I have version 3.1.2.1733, so I think I'm all set.  I'll try running Office 365 operations that cause them to hang (primarily copy / paste operations and saving new files) to see if the problem is resolved.

Thanks for your help.

Edit:   tried some things that caused Excel and Word to hang, they worked!  I think I'm okay now.

Edited May 26, 2017 by arm1001

[nikhils]

Sounds good. Keep us posted.

Thank you

[109220250]

I have the same problem.  My Office 365 excel and word documents get kicked off and continue restarting and not saving my changes.  Microsoft 365 support removed malwarebytes and my office worded great!  I wanted MWB so I reinstalled and i am having the same problems - again!!!  Help

[Firefox]

2 minutes ago, 109220250 said:

I have the same problem.  My Office 365 excel and word documents get kicked off and continue restarting and not saving my changes.  Microsoft 365 support removed malwarebytes and my office worded great!  I wanted MWB so I reinstalled and i am having the same problems - again!!!  Help

What version of Malwarebytes did you install?

Let's try and get some logs first so the team can review them and see if they can tell what may be causing your issues....

1. If that does not correct the issue, then please read the following and attach to your next reply the 3 requested logs - Diagnostic Logs (the 3 logs are: mb-check-results.zip, FRST.txt, Addition.txt)
   

Please let us know how it goes.

Thank You,

Firefox

[109220250]

9 minutes ago, Firefox said:

What version of Malwarebytes did you install?

Let's try and get some logs first so the team can review them and see if they can tell what may be causing your issues....

1. If that does not correct the issue, then please read the following and attach to your next reply the 3 requested logs - Diagnostic Logs (the 3 logs are: mb-check-results.zip, FRST.txt, Addition.txt)

Please let us know how it goes.

Thank You,

Firefox

I have malwarebytes premium  

[109220250]

12 minutes ago, Firefox said:

What version of Malwarebytes did you install?

Let's try and get some logs first so the team can review them and see if they can tell what may be causing your issues....

1. If that does not correct the issue, then please read the following and attach to your next reply the 3 requested logs - Diagnostic Logs (the 3 logs are: mb-check-results.zip, FRST.txt, Addition.txt)

Please let us know how it goes.

Thank You,

Firefox

I have malwarebytes premium  I don't know what else to do.  i am not a computer geek!

[Firefox]

2 minutes ago, 109220250 said:

I have malwarebytes premium  

Need more info than that, for example version 3.0.6 had the issue your seeing, but the latest version which is 3.1.2.1733 CU 1.0.160 does not have the issue your seeing, it was corrected in the newest builds.

You can download the latest version from here: https://downloads.malwarebytes.com/file/mb3

[JohnV]

Hi Ingber this solution solved the problem we shared, being unable to close and save Word 2016 files. My concern is by turning off this "protection" is my computer now vulnerable when I'm using Office 365 application software? 

[dcollins]

@JohnV did you update to 3.1.2? If so, this issue should no longer be happening, so you can keep all of your protections enabled