Excel.exe (M365) spawns dozens of running instances (one user's wkstation)

Question

Excel.exe (M365) spawns dozens of running instances (one user's wkstation)

Gary E. Goodman 0

User checks Task Mgr in the morning, for reasons other than Excel. Once a week or two, dozens of Excel.EXE are seen in Task Manager or Process Explorer. He's not running that many Excel spreadsheets during normal work. When he closes a spreadsheet, that seems to close the process normally.

These seem to have been spawned/opened overnight, (but it's also possible that this happened during work and wasn't noticed until morning).

I arrived late after he had closed these instances - contra my request to leave them running - but he noticed arguments listed

-automation embedding on each or most of these. (Not sure if that's 100% accurate but close. I wanted to check in Process Explorer for more clues and precise info.)

I couldn't find anything that looked relevant in Event Viewer.
I found Information alerts:

Microsoft Office 16 Alerts
EventID 300
ProcessID] 33876
Compositor Type: 1 
   EXCEL 
Compositor Type: 1EXCELP1: %3P2: %4P3: %5P4: %6

(this system wouldn't let me paste the above as plain text)

I didn't find any articles linking these Information events to the "problem" I'm describing.

He is the only engineer using Visual Studio to create some small modules for Autodesk.

Yes, this is Office 32-bit running on Windows 11 x64, for reasons.

Has anyone seen something like this (attachment) ?
Microsoft Excel many.png

David Tepsaskul 0 Reputation points

2023-03-08T13:49:52.8766667+00:00

I am not sure if this is related, but I'm a normal user on my work laptop just updated to Windows 11 22H2.

Once in a while, seemingly randomly, my cursor would get possessed for a split second before an Office 365 window reminder would show up. This would happen with the same symptoms repeatedly throughout the day. Something like "Office 365 is being rebranded to Microsoft 365" or the like and REALLY wants me to sign in (I'm already signed in). When this happens, my machine thinks I'm always holding down CTRL and my cursor wouldn't be able to click on anything like there is an invisible overlay on top of everything. I have to unplug the keyboard, replug it back in, initiate CTRL+ALT+DELETE in time (waiting too long and it will be unresponsive), then it goes back to normal (most of the time). I uninstalled Office 365 app that's supposedly doing this but when the error occurred again it now opened Office 365 webpage in my browser instead. Very tenacious.

The app in question:

So I uninstalled Office 365 that worked fine on Win 10 before and reinstalled it through that same rebranding window. The very next day the same bug happened again, but this time it opened Narrator settings, Word, Excel, and was about to close Power BI that I was working on, etc. I looked in the Event Viewer and found the same entries as you, but because it opened multiple Office apps, I do get more of a variety:

Compositor Type: 1WINWORDP1: %3P2: %4P3: %5P4: %6

Compositor Type: 1EXCELP1: %3P2: %4P3: %5P4: %6

Every subsequent Excel opened manually would give the same thing each time.

Sorry if this isn't related, but when I googled the EXCEL string, your question is the only place that came up.
Brian Swingley 0 Reputation points

2024-01-16T17:58:41.3966667+00:00

I am getting the same event 300 error as above today. my spreadsheets had functional macros this morning and now the macros are not showing. I'm seeing this event 300 error in my event viewer many, many times.
Ali Khalid Awan 0 Reputation points

2024-08-26T14:33:32.9666667+00:00

Hi David, I am facing same issue. Did you found any solution?

2 answers

Your answer

David Tepsaskul 0 Reputation points

2023-03-08T13:49:52.8766667+00:00

I am not sure if this is related, but I'm a normal user on my work laptop just updated to Windows 11 22H2.

Once in a while, seemingly randomly, my cursor would get possessed for a split second before an Office 365 window reminder would show up. This would happen with the same symptoms repeatedly throughout the day. Something like "Office 365 is being rebranded to Microsoft 365" or the like and REALLY wants me to sign in (I'm already signed in). When this happens, my machine thinks I'm always holding down CTRL and my cursor wouldn't be able to click on anything like there is an invisible overlay on top of everything. I have to unplug the keyboard, replug it back in, initiate CTRL+ALT+DELETE in time (waiting too long and it will be unresponsive), then it goes back to normal (most of the time). I uninstalled Office 365 app that's supposedly doing this but when the error occurred again it now opened Office 365 webpage in my browser instead. Very tenacious.

The app in question:

So I uninstalled Office 365 that worked fine on Win 10 before and reinstalled it through that same rebranding window. The very next day the same bug happened again, but this time it opened Narrator settings, Word, Excel, and was about to close Power BI that I was working on, etc. I looked in the Event Viewer and found the same entries as you, but because it opened multiple Office apps, I do get more of a variety:

Compositor Type: 1WINWORDP1: %3P2: %4P3: %5P4: %6

Compositor Type: 1EXCELP1: %3P2: %4P3: %5P4: %6

Every subsequent Excel opened manually would give the same thing each time.

Sorry if this isn't related, but when I googled the EXCEL string, your question is the only place that came up.
Brian Swingley 0 Reputation points

2024-01-16T17:58:41.3966667+00:00

I am getting the same event 300 error as above today. my spreadsheets had functional macros this morning and now the macros are not showing. I'm seeing this event 300 error in my event viewer many, many times.
Ali Khalid Awan 0 Reputation points

2024-08-26T14:33:32.9666667+00:00

Hi David, I am facing same issue. Did you found any solution?

Answer 1

Subhish Babu 0

Hi all,
I am getting the same error as mentioned above. Is there a solution?
In other internet results, found it might be to do with license issue but doesn't seems like that. Any other solutions?

Answer 2

Baribeault Marcel 0

I have a VBA script in Excel, since the return from vacation (August 12), Excel without warning at the end of the Code.

in the event viewer I have this message

Compositor Type: 1EXCELP1: %3P2: %4P3: %5P4: %6

what is the reason for this message and how to fix my problem?

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Excel.exe (M365) spawns dozens of running instances (one user's wkstation)

2 answers

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