Office version 2608 causing issues with VBA using ActiveX Objects

Question

Using VBA with certain ActiveX controls is displaying the following errors:

This seems to affect any applications that use VBA, but the simplest steps to reproduce are:

1. Copy this very old control to C:\Windows\SysWOW64 folder: ExtLVCTL.ocx.txt
   1. Remove the txt extension.
   2. Register it: Regsvr32 ExtLVCTL.ocx
2. Open Excel to a new workbook.
3. Enter VBA using Alt+F11
4. Insert a UserForm.
5. Right Click the Toolbox and select "Additional Controls..."
6. In the Available Controls find "Extended Listview Control", check it, and Press OK.
7. Drag and Drop this new Ext LV control to the UserForm.
8. Close the Form.
9. Open the Form again.
10. If on Office 365 Version 2608, observe the above errors.
11. If on Version 2607, the errors do not occur.

I have also tested disabling office updates, reverting from 2608 to 2607, and found the error no longer occurs.

This seems to be happening for various controls, such as the above and iGrid control from 10Tec, which others have reported here: "https://10tec.com/forum/Posts/t7361-32-bit-ActiveX-iGrid-Issue"

Here are a few other links recently reporting this issue or at least a similar issue:

"https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5985986/since-latest-excel-release-a-form-on-my-excel-proj"

"https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5985192/our-excel-add-in-process-runner-glsu-fails-to-load"

"https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoftoffice/comments/1vtv5zh/recent_office_update_broke_vba_macro_emailer/"

I had a backup from a user exhibiting this issue restored to a bare metal Hyper-V system so I could research and test on, so if you need to me to test something, let me know.

Answer 1

Thus far, the 2608 update released on 9/1 appears to have resolved the issue:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/current-channel

Answer 2

Hola Eric,

Based on the reproduction steps and the other reports you linked, this looks much more like an Office 2608 issue in the VBA/ActiveX hosting layer than a problem with the individual OCX.

Your testing is especially convincing because the same control works in 2607, fails in 2608, and works again after rolling Office back.

The &H80004005 error is a COM error E_FAIL, which is essentially a generic failure returned when the component or host cannot provide a more specific HRESULT. The follow-up "Out of memory" message is likely misleading here.

VBA UserForms host ActiveX controls as COM/OLE objects. When the form is reopened, Office has to instantiate the registered control and restore its persisted state. If something changed in 2608 in that activation or state-loading path, VBA can surface generic errors like E_FAIL or "Out of memory" even though the machine is not actually low on memory.

Because you have already done a clean 2607/2608 comparison, I would not spend much time changing Trust Center settings, re-registering controls repeatedly, or rewriting the form yet. Those would make more sense if the issue reproduced across versions.

The one thing I would still verify is the exact 2608 build and Office architecture. You can get that quickly with PowerShell:

Get-ItemProperty 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration' | Select-Object VersionToReport,ClientVersionToReport,Platform,UpdateChannel

Could you post the output from that on one of the affected systems?

For production systems, staying on 2607 appears to be the safest temporary workaround while Microsoft investigates. Microsoft documents the supported Office rollback process here.

Thanks,

James

Answer 3

Hi Eric,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A forum.

Thank you for providing such detailed information about this issue.

Based on your description, the clear reproduction steps you provided, and similar reports from other users, it appears that Version 2608 may be causing an issue related to VBA and certain ActiveX controls.

In this situation, I recommend submitting feedback directly to the Excel product team through the Feedback feature (Help > Feedback) so that they can investigate and determine whether this is a regression issue introduced in Version 2608.

If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to share them in the comments on this post so I can continue to support you.

I look forward to continuing the conversation.

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