Microsoft rolled out the latest cumulative update for Windows 10, which mainly fixes issues with Wi-Fi connectivity. However, it's apparently not ready to go live yet, coming with a couple of software-related errors.
The most recent Office update also brought some problems to Word 2010, 2013 and 2016.
Windows 10 Errors
KB3124200 has caused some applications to no longer work properly, including Edge not closing; File Explorer, Outlook 2016 and Calculator not starting; the Windows Store, Calendar and Maps not responding and many others.
How To Fix The Errors On Windows 10
As of press time, Microsoft has yet to release an official fix, but manually downloading and installing the update could resolve the issues, as some users reported.
Word Errors
The 16.0.6636.2036 update for Office appears to prevent Word from loading customizations, including custom templates, autotext entries, autocorrect, autoformat settings, macros, style and envelope addresses.
A Microsoft engineer who goes by the username Rob_L on the community forum has confirmed that the update renames "Normal.dotm" to "Normal.dotm.old," causing Word to load the defaults instead.
"This means that all of the content in that original Normal.dotm (macros, autotext entries, styles, etc.) will no longer be loaded by Word, and when Word shuts down, a new 'clean' Normal.dotm will be created," he says.
At first, this was widely attributed to the KB3124200 update, but Ed Bott of ZDNet thoroughly investigated the matter and found out that the error was in fact caused by the Office update.
"[M]y old Normal.dotm file was renamed to Normal.dotm.old, and the next time I created a document in Word it generated a new, blank Normal document template," Bott says, after testing version 16.0.6636.2036 on an earlier Windows 10 version.
How To Fix The Errors On Word
Microsoft has addressed the bug in a Knowledge Base article on KB3129969. Here's how to fix the issue on missing customizations in Word:
Step 1: Close Microsoft Word.
Step 2: Go to Control Panel and navigate through Appearance and Personalization and File Explorer Options.
Step 3: Click the View tab and look for the "Hide extensions for known file types" check box under "Advanced settings" and clear them to turn on file name extensions. Click OK afterward.
Step 4: Open the Run application (Windows button + R or search for it), type "%appdata%\Microsoft\Templates" and click OK to open the templates folder.
Step 5: Right click on the Normal.dotm configuration file and select Rename.
Step 6: Change the name to "NormalBeforeRestore.dotm."
Step 7: Locate at least one of these file names: Normal.dotm.old, NormalPre, NormalPre15, NormalOld or OldNormal. If you find more than one of these files, choose the most recently modified one, right click on it and choose Copy. Also, if you can't find the "Date modified" value, click on the View tab and select Details in the layout options.
Step 8: Paste it on the folder (Control + V or right click inside the window and choose Paste).
Step 9: Right click on the copied file, choose Rename and change the name to "normal.dotm." A warning about changing the file extension could pop up, and when it does, simply ignore it.
That should do the trick, but if it doesn't you can go ahead and return to the templates folder, delete the normal.dotm file you just created and repeat Steps 7 to 9, choosing one of the other aforementioned file names until you find the correct one.
To turn off the file extension names, repeat Steps 2 to 3, but this time, tick the check box for "Hide extensions for known file types" instead of clearing it.
At any rate, the errors weren't as big of a problem as some online users made them out to be, but they still caused some minor inconveniences. One last thing about the Windows 10 errors: if the manual installation of the KB3124200 update doesn't work, perhaps a rollback to earlier Windows versions could be a solution.
Photo: Scott W. Vincent | Flickr
