Uniscribe and Office 2010 crashes

[AxialInfo]

Have installed Office 2010 but I'm having crashes in Outlook. Event viewer implicates "usp10.dll" which I now know is Windows' Uniscribe API component for rendering complex fonts and Unicode-encoded text.

From research it appears that a similar crash is affecting other Office 2010 apps (or at least Word and Outlook) and on both XP and Win7.

Apparently a partial workaround is to uninstall old Adobe Type1 versions of fonts. In my case uninstalling Helvetica has fixed the crash for now, although I suspect it may reappear if other old Type1 fonts are referenced in e-mails (Times, Palatino, etc) or documents. Workaround is unsat if one needs to use old files containing those fonts.

Another workaround is to leave the fonts installed but to use the problematic Type1 fonts immediately upon opening Outlook or Word, being sure that the message is previewed so that the font(s) are rendered. Apparently that will avoid the crash until the next time the system is rebooted. This can be automated with a Word macro (but apparently not in Outlook).  [if anybody would like a URL to MS TechNet forum thread for a reference to these workarounds I can post it if permitted.]

So far I haven't found any recent references to the usp10.dll or to Uniscribe on the Adobe site except for some specifically concerning Thai fonts.

MS has this KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-US;2119612

There are many versions of usp10.dll, as shown here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniscribe

I'd like to approach the problem from the direction of possibly swapping version(s) of usp10.dll in order to test using different editions.

In my system I had multiple copies of usp10.dll, most of which were removed when all Office2003 apps were uninstalled, leaving only one copy in the \Office14 directory and a second (of different date and slightly different version) one in Windows\system32.

Has Adobe addressed this issue in any way?

[Dov Isaacs]

The problem has absolutely nothing to do with anything done by Adobe.

In fact I ran into the same issue when I migrated from Office 2007 to Office 2010.

The bug is in Office 2010, specifically in Word and one of its support modules.

Microsoft is fully aware of the problem.

The fix is expected in one of the upcoming "cumulative Office 2010 updates" as well as in Office 2010 SP1 due for release soon.

          - Dov

[AxialInfo]

Thank you, Dov. Didn't mean to imply that it was an Adobe problem, I only wondered whether, because the workaround related to removing Adobe fonts, that it might be something that Adobe might be addressing in a knowledge base article or something.

As always, your insight and dedication to sharing your knowledge with us mere mortals is sine qua non.

Sheila

[AxialInfo]

As follow-up, MS released a hotfix late Dec 2010 for x86 and x64 versions of Office 2010:

Description of the Word 2010 hotfix package (Word-x-none.msp): December 14, 2010

This seems to have fixed the usp10.dll crashes for me.

Sheila