Solved: Getting "Error in loading DLL" messages after reverting back from Office 365 to Office 2013

Question

We were having random issues with our Office 365 (64-bit) installations on at least two computers experiencing intermittent "is not responding" and "has stopped working" messages when running MSACCESS.EXE alone or simply opening a new blank MS Access instance.  This problem occurs more frequently when multiple instances are open and running at the same time (but that's another story).  So our IT department eventually decided to revert or downgrade back to our non-365 Office 2013 Pro (64-bit) product, which was proven to be reliable and stable before we upgraded to the 365 version.  But after uninstalling 365 and re-installing Office 2013, we ran into a new situation where our VBA based solutions could not find the correct Object Libraries for Office 2013.  It kept referring to the previous Office 365 library which had already been uninstalled.  So this appeared to be a registry problem. 

After spending a couple of days experimenting, testing, and searching with Bing and Google, I finally found a way to fix this problem, which isn't intuitive or explained well enough on any of the search results.  It requires hacking the system's registry and should only be performed by an expert.  So here is how I solved this:

After deleting the "1.9" key in the registry and rebooting, my VBA solutions in MS Access were able to find the correct Object Library for Excel for Office 2013 under Tools -> References.  Then the "Error in loading DLL" message no longer appeared.  We had a similar problem with VBA code using the Outlook Object Library that was fixed in the same way.

Message To Microsoft: 

I suggest you include deleting these keys in your uninstall code and documentation that describes how to manually uninstall Office.