Several readers have emailed to complain about yet another Office bug caused by an update pushed out by Microsoft.
The company has managed to break one of their own VBA controls, used by third-party Office developers. The control mscomctl.ocx (version 6.01.9846) can cause the error “Object doesn’t support this property or method”. Sadly, a common and typically unhelpful error message (What object? What property or method?).
The cause appears to be updates for Office 2016/2013 and 2010. KB2920727 , KB3039794 , KB2881029 for 32-bit releases.
As usual, Microsoft is silent on the matter. Leaving their paying customers to work it out for themselves. The Knowledge Base articles give not hint of the trouble that might arise from the patch.
UPDATE: Finally, Microsoft added a ‘Known Issues’ section to the KB articles plus another KB with some details.
Even then, Microsoft can’t bring itself to admit an error. The ‘Cause’ of the problem is given as:
“This problem occurs because security update MS16-004 may prevent certain ActiveX controls from loading correctly within pre-existing Access databases or in Design view.”
This particular Microsoft failure won’t affect most people but developers will be pulling their hair out.
Workaround
The temporary workaround is to uninstall the troublesome patch. Go to the Windows list of installed updates and select the one to uninstall. Look for the update with the matching KB article listed above.
But that’s not all. Windows can try to reinstall the patch that was just uninstalled (What was Microsoft thinking?) So, you might want to stop or defer installing more upgrades until the problem is resolved.
Darren Myher has detailed coverage of this issue.
