Fix Internet Explorer Crashes with SharePoint 2013 Online Presence Indicators

Until the other day when I figured this out, every time I hovered my mouse pointer over a presence indicator on SharePoint Online, my browser – which is Internet Explorer 10 at the moment – would crash.

It wasn’t some polite little crash, either. The window would freeze, the dreaded “Internet Explorer has stopped working” message would pop up, and I’d need to reload the page.

Forget about the “Check online for a solution and close the program” option. I tried clicking on that many times, if only to send the telemetry to Microsoft, but nothing useful came of it. “Close the program” it was and the Internet Explorer window would open up again.

This isn’t some huge loss unless you were entering data. The fact that it happened regularly when I was just moving my mouse from one part of the screen to another but not really hovering was annoying, though.

I asked about this in the MVP forums I have access to and no one else seemed to recognize the exact issue. Other browser issues, sure, but not this one. I decided to do a more serious round of Bingling.

I found a useful article from Patrick Fegan called Internet Explorer Crashing with Lync Contact Card. It told me perhaps how to fix the issue, but not why it was happening.

The MSDN forum thread that Patrick referenced was a little more help. After a little more searching I found a post somewhere which made me look at the NameCtrl Class add-on in Internet Explorer. As you can see in the image below, the version was 14.0.6109.5000. Wait, 14??? I’m running Office 2013 on my laptop, so by all rights that version number ought to start with 15.

Looking at the “More Information” link for the add-on, I could see that the date for the Name.DLL files was Tuesday, August 09, 2011, which also didn’t sound right.

Here’s all of the info in text, for better search engine indexing:

Name:                   NameCtrl Class
Publisher:              Microsoft Corporation
Type:                   ActiveX Control
Architecture:           32-bit
Version:                14.0.6109.5000
File date:              ‎Tuesday, ‎August ‎09, ‎2011, ‏‎6:14 PM
Date last accessed:     ‎Today, ‎November ‎27, ‎2013, ‏‎4 minutes ago
Class ID:               {E18FEC31-2EA1-49A2-A7A6-902DC0D1FF05}
Use count:              8439
Block count:            7
File:                   NAME.DLL
Folder:                 C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14

Patrick’s post recommended running repair on the Office installation, which certainly seemed like a good idea because I seemed to have some bits which were out of date somehow.

I haven’t needed to d a repair on Office 2013 before, and I couldn’t find it! More Bingling ensued, and I realized that it was available in the Windows 7 Control Panel under Programs and Features. (Yes, I’m still running Windows 7.)

Clicking on Change brought up the dialog where I could select Repair.

After some chugging and churning, the repair was done and I went back to Internet Explorer to look at the NameCtrl Class add-on.

Et voila! The version was comfortably in the 15 range at 15.0.4420.1017 and the date was Monday, October 01, 2012.

Name:                   NameCtrl Class
Publisher:              Microsoft Corporation
Type:                   ActiveX Control
Architecture:           32-bit
Version:                15.0.4420.1017
File date:              ‎Monday, ‎October ‎01, ‎2012, ‏‎9:32 PM
Date last accessed:     ‎Today, ‎November ‎27, ‎2013, ‏‎3 minutes ago
Class ID:               {E18FEC31-2EA1-49A2-A7A6-902DC0D1FF05}
Use count:              8446
Block count:            7
File:                   NAME.DLL
Folder:                 C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15

Even better, the presence indicators work fine now!