To troubleshoot an Outlook 2013 issue I am trying to prevent it from loading DLLs. I have already disabled all COM add-ins but Process Explorer still shows many DLLs being loaded. How to I manage these DLLs?
Background is that when doing a Reply to certain email addresses (1 or 2), when I hit the Send button Outlook crashes. It is quite reproducible. I used Microsoft’s Office Configuration Analyzer Tool 1.1 to try to diagnose the crashes, but its only advice was to disable COM add-ins and then re-enable them one at a time to see which one is causing the problem. However, the problem still exists after all add-ins are disabled. Then I looked at what DLL’s are loading, which is quite a few.
Here’s a description of how addins are defined.
Its possible that the DLL is not getting itself defined in the addons list, so it cannot be disabled by the GUI
However, its probably a corruption of Outlook. Uninstall Outlook, install it again…
If you have disabled the addins, then remaining DLLs are most likely providing core functionality to Outlook, and attempts to prevent them loading will cause Outlook to fail.
There is a DLL, for example, called DropboxExt.22.dll and LINKEDINPROVIDER.dll that are loaded when all add-ins are disabled. I do use Dropbox and LinkedIn but there are no add-ins for them. It’s not that I think that’s necessarily the problem but there are lots of DLLs like these.
Well you can move the files so that they can’t be loaded,
or find where in the registry outlook uses them.
DropboxExt.22.dll may be an windows explorer add on, there is a third party utility to manage explorer addons.