Office 2016: Keep having to run repair tool

I have Office 2016 Home and Business (click-to-run version). About 6 weeks ago I tried starting Outlook and a box came up saying "Office is updating, please wait". After a while this ended with an error message. I found the solution was to run an office repair, and a quick repair resolved. There are no errors logged in the event viewer that I can find.

Since then this has been repeating every few days. This morning the first time after a week and I know the PC was shut down last night cleanly with nothing running. I've run "sfc /scannow" and it finds nothing wrong. My system is W10 20H2 (slow ring) and I wonder if that's the cause? I've tried both online repair and quick repair and it makes no difference - everything is fine for a few days before the problem returns. Office is fully patched (13029.20344).

Any ideas?

SoFine409 said:

Do you by any chance have Office 2016 installed on 2 different PCs?

No - just mine. It was first installed in late 2016 and has worked fine till a couple of months ago.

The known 0xc0000142 error. I also have this problem. I haven´t found a "definite" solution, haven´t try a uninstall and reinstall.

You could try to re-register DLLs, as described in
How to Fix Office Application Unable to Start 0xc0000142.

This can "solve" the problem, but the fix can be temporary.

Anibor said:

The known 0xc0000142 error. I also have this problem. I haven´t found a "definite" solution, haven´t try a uninstall and reinstall.

You could try to re-register DLLs, as described in
How to Fix Office Application Unable to Start 0xc0000142.

This can "solve" the problem, but the fix can be temporary.

Yes I've seen this article too when Googling but at present the repair tool (quick repair) fixes the problem. I've also tried the online repair, which also does a complete re-install, but the problem returned the following week.

Looks like I have to live with it for the time being ....

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Looks like rebooting is what triggers the problem. I've been using Word, Excel and Outlook at various times during the day. Then I decided to restart the PC having made sure nothing was running. When the machine came back, there's the problem again.

I have subsequently done 3-4 more restarts and after the last the problem comes back. Now fixing it involves either running quick repair or rebooting. As I only reboot normally once per day, this would tie in with the problem occurring every 4-5 days.

Don't know what reboot is doing to cause it, nor whether it's because I'm on the slow-ring with 20H2.

Perhaps a clean install of 2004 might be called for ...

Have you fixed (temporarily) the problem just by rebooting? I will try this next time.

I was thinking this sequence of events could trigger the problem: a scheduled task related to Office is executed, this task makes changes to the registry, which activate after a reboot or power-on, and these changes causes the error.

Most suggested "solutions" I have seen involve making changes to the registry.

Anibor said:

Have you fixed (temporarily) the problem just by rebooting? I will try this next time.

I was thinking this sequence of events could trigger the problem: a scheduled task related to Office is executed, this task makes changes to the registry, which activate after a reboot or power-on, and these changes causes the error.

Most suggested "solutions" I have seen involve making changes to the registry.

Yes - simple rebooting fixes it too. As I mentioned in my previous post, just rebooting repeatedly results in the problem occurring every 4th or 5th time. I've also removed 20H2 and reverted to 2004 (fortunately a simple fix) but that makes no difference.

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Well I've managed to sort my problem eventually. I updated Windows to 2004 level during May, after which I took an image dump of my C drive with Macrium Reflect which I've just found. I remember at the beginning of July seeing a failed Office update in Reliability Monitor but didn't understand what it was about. Office updated OK but I suspect that was the cause of the problem.

So having secured my personal files (most are not on the C drive) I restored this image, and updated everything back up to current levels. Now I can no longer reproduce the problem. Previously, it only needed 2 or 3 reboots for the problem to appear - just done 10 in quick succession with no problem.

Sorry I've got no technical solution to the problem, but I've made it go away. I assume it might be something to do with a registry or timing issue, but intermittent problems like this are often very difficult to track down.

Thanks for all your help.