Word 2003 add in load failure

Question

I've developed an add in for Word 2003 Standard Edition using the IDTExtensibility2 interface using Visual Studio 2008 on Windows XP. The add in runs fine on the development machine. Unfortunately after installing the add in, it doesn't load on the client machines.

The symptoms are as follows:

1. The first time Word is run after the add in is installed, its load behaviour is changed from 3 to 2 in the registry. Changing the load behaviour back to 3 always reverts the load behaviour back to 2 the next time Word is run.

2. If you simply install Visual Studio 2008 on the client machine, the add in starts to work. If you subsequently remove Visual Studio 2008 from the client machine, the add in no longer works.

3. Using vbscript to instantiate the add in outside of Word, the error code 0x8013141A is returned. Looking on the internet this appears to be primarily caused by the assembly not being signed correctly. Using the sn tool to sign the assembly returns that the assembly is not a strongly named assembly.

I've looked at so many possible solutions to these problems on the internet and not a single one has resolved this issue.

Answer 1

The next step is to try to sign the assembly as a strong named one, microsoft provides a guide to do so at this webpage: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xc31ft41.aspx . After you create your keys and successfully complete the procedure you can see if the error still occurs. On a development environment a lot of dll's, assemblies, and protection setting are changed to allow you to execute and debug code. You would need to install a version of the addon with debug symbols and something like the Debugging Tools for Windows for native code or MDbg or coredbg( Lightweight .NET debugger? ) to see what is going on on your reference machine.