Microsoft has finally patched the graphical glitch in Outlook that we have been seeing for over a year. In September, Marcus wrote:
Kraft Kennedy, and many of our clients, have seen a strange problem for the last 12 months. In certain circumstances, parts of the Outlook client goes black, or other graphical glitches display. Once the problem occurs, the user can temporarily resolve it by restarting Outlook and the issue goes away, for a varying amount of time. For users who experience the problem, they likely see it return.
The best solution, at the time, was to migrate from Office 32-bit to Office 64-bit.
Microsoft has now released an update with a solution it calls “Large Address Aware (LAA) state,” which should work for the 32-bit version of both Outlook 2013 and 2016.
In today’s update, Microsoft explains the problem thus:
Assume that you use Microsoft Outlook 2016 or Microsoft Outlook 2013 for some time. Even if you have moderate memory use, the contiguous free memory space is exhausted. This causes a fragmented and non-rendering UI.
LAA will increase the maximum address space for 32-bit executables from 2GB to 4GB to accommodate modern display requirements.
The fix has already been included in the Office 365 click-to-run version. Otherwise, KB4018376 for Outlook 2013 and KB4018372 for Outlook 2016 promise to address these memory issues, among a few other glitches.
Get the update here and send along any questions or concerns you have to hello@kraftkennedy.com.