o365 powerpoint crashing on VDIs

Products

• Data Loss Prevention

Issue/Introduction

Application focus is switching between active windows. 

When closing powerpoint.exe on windows VDI environments powerpoint.exe doesn't close down all the way. We can see powerpoint.exe still running in taskmanager. When launching a second instance of powerpoint the active focus window will switch back and forth between instances of powerpoint.exe

Environment

Aternity agent

windows 10/11

edpa agent

Cause

"The problem occurs wiht the following race conditions with a hang on RPCRT4!RPC_INTERFACE::WaitForAutoListenCallbacks when an interface is being unregistered for RPC (cross-context proxy/stub calls).  This is set typically when async call is made and cleared when it returns.  We cannot see when it is set and it is never cleared, so we are hung.  It appears this occurs because the LPC port is trying to process but the app has already exited main loop and called for OLE to unload, so if the call is waiting on the main thread to process posted messages, it will never happen, and thus a deadlock.  This appears to be a Windows design issue.

Resolution

Disable aternity agent from monitoring powerpoint.exe 

Disable the following monitoring features for powerpoint in the Aternity Console:

• open
• save
• create
• launch