Friday, August 09, 2013

Oracle BI Publisher Desktop Microsoft Visual Basic System Error &H8000FFFF -2147418113 Catastrophic failure

Not too sure what I changed on my laptop, possibly just installation of another product or perhaps Microsoft or similar updates, but when I went to edit a BI Publisher RTF template I got the following error message on clicking ANY button in the BI Publisher plugin for Microsoft Word.

---------------------------
Microsoft Visual Basic
---------------------------
System Error &H8000FFFF (-2147418113). Catastrophic failure 
---------------------------
OK   Help   
---------------------------

After quite a bit of researching, I found the solution, for me it was the second of the following fixes:

1. Delete the EXD files. I attempted this in the root of my C:\ and D:\ drives, but it didn't fix the error.

DEL /S /A:H /A:-H *.EXD

2. Change security setting, and then reboot Windows.

2a. For Windows 32bit:

Regsvr32 "C:\Windows\System32\MSCOMCTL.OCX"

2b. For Windows 64bit:

Regsvr32 "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\MSCOMCTL.OCX"

Problem solved!

Catch ya!

Gareth

This is a post from Gareth's blog at http://garethroberts.blogspot.com

References

Related Posts

1 comment:

Chris said...

I recall having an issue very similar to this. It happened when I upgraded from Office 2003 to either 2007 or 2010. I think the root cause was that Microsoft's newer security model identifies the BI Publisher add-in as suspicious, so wouldn't allow it to run. I remember going through steps similar to what you've listed.

On a related note, Office 2013 does not work with BI Publisher at all, or WebADI. Hopefully Oracle will eventually release a patch, as Office 2013 is what is shipping with new laptops these days.