Office programs not exiting properly - any of them.

Got a fun one here. I have a client with five computers all running Windows 10 and Office 365. Pretty much all of them are running well, until this week one of them went weird. I was called in because it was running slowly and Access in particular was acting up (they share a program that uses an Access database so it gets opened and closed all the time).

What I found was surprising: When I opened the Task Manager there were a whole bunch of instances of Access running and of course consuming resources, even though no window was open and usable. A little research suggested that there might be a line of code that needs to be fixed in order for it to fully exit, and I started thinking it was an issue with their program.

But then I started experimenting with the other parts of Office, opening and closing Word, Excel etc. and discovered that I was getting the same thing with some, but not all of them. More telling, opening in safe mode would work just fine for the ones staying open. One would then point fingers towards an add-on problem, but alas, not a single one of them has any of them installed or loaded.

So I did both types of repairs, then uninstalled and reinstalled Office. Twice, in fact, because I didn't realize at first that I needed the 32 bit version for Access to use the database. I also ran the cleanup tool after the first uninstall. Either way, after every attempt I had at least one or two programs not exiting properly. (Quick edit: In testing I didn't even open a database in Access, just opening and closing it, so it can't possibly be an issue with their shared program.)

I checked for malware. Clean as a whistle. Disk check and SFC, no problems. I upgraded to version 1903 (it happened to be on 1803 at the time). If anything it all got worse, by the time I gave up I think every Office program was sticking around on exit.

Windows 10 now has the "feature" of reopening whatever you previously were using on reboot, so doing so will open up new windows of whichever program hadn't exited, so no help there.

For the interim I wrote a batch file to taskkill all of the various Office programs at night so it wouldn't get out of hand again, as they leave their machines on all the time.

I feel like I'm careening towards a reformat, but I figure it's worth seeing if anyone has words of wisdom for me.

No surprise, going to reformat.

Did the reformat improve things? I think there is a bug.

I have no scheduled tasks etc or instructions for any to load on start up and I shut them all down before I switch off. I have noticed that the 365 office apps are NOT shutting themselves properly when closed. It’s not all the time but most of the time. Example is closing excel, then look in task manager under processes. You will see Microsoft excel still in the list! I think this is why on next boot it may auto start. This has a nasty side effect on outlook. If the process for say excel or word is still going (even tho it appears to be shut) then outlook will hang on on loading profile when opened. As soon as you kill the excel process in task manager then outlook will load fine. This is a nasty bug and I’m not sure when it began. Is a recent 365 update to blame or maybe windows 1903, I can’t be sure. Happens to all our machines and seen it at work too!