At work, I maintain an Access 2010 database that interfaces with Word, Excel and Outlook. Recently, Lync 2013 was rolled out across the office, without upgrading the rest of Office. Suddenly all interop calls started failing with “Automation error. Library not registered.” errors.
A bit of digging revealed that the Lync 2013 installation process adds registry entries for the Office 2013 (i.e. version 15) automation libraries, regardless of whether the individual 2013 applications are installed. The solution is to remove the offending registry keys, keeping the version 14 keys in place.
I put together the following .reg file to remove the keys for Outlook, Word and Excel respectively:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{00062FFF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}\9.5]
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{00020905-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}\8.6]
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{00020813-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}\1.8]
There doesn’t seem to be an official Microsoft solution for this – I previously repairing the Office 2010 installation but this had no effect.