SharePoint 2016 Stop Working after Excel 2016 Installed on SharePoint server

Question

We installed Excel 2016 on a SharePoint 2016 server hosting Central Admin. Everything was working fine prior to the Excel install, but after the install and rebooting the Server, SharePoint sites no longer were reachable, SharePoint Central Admin, and the SharePoint Timer Service stopped working, The SharePoint IIS App Pools stopped. Does Excel introduce conflicting binaries? In SharePoint 2010 and 2013 environments we were able to install Office on a SharePoint server without any issues. SharePoint 2016 is acting differently.

When trying to start the SharePoint Timer Service, the following error is displayed: "Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion". Increasing the timeout did not solve this error.

The event viewer shows multiple errors. One is: "There was an internal error invoking the timer job 'GUID #' for service 'GUID #

Another error: "The Module DLL 'C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\16\isapi\owssvr.dll could not be loaded due to a configuration problem. The current configuration only supports loading images built for a x86 processor architecture...."

Answer 1

It is not supported to install Office client applications on a SharePoint Server due to conflicting binaries, as you've noted.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/install/hardware-and-software-requirements#minimum-requirements-for-sharepoint-servers-in-a-farm

You will want to build a new SharePoint Server, join it to the farm, start the appropriate service instance(s), possibly move the Search roles if applicable (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/search/manage-search-components), then remove the server showing the error from the farm. You will likely need to do this via Central Admin -> Manage Servers in Farm rather than the Config Wizard on the broken server.