COM add-in not showing up in some localised versions of Excel

A

alecbeau

Hello,

I developed a COM Add-in for Excel and I recently had the issue
described in this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908002/en-us

I did what the article suggested (include the update as a pre-requisite
in the add-in setup project) and that solved the issue for most users.

However, this wasn't solved for users running Excel localised in these
languages: Russian, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified
Chinese.

I suspect this has to do with the fact that these are non-Roman
languages and that users use a MUI over an English install of Office
2003. I managed to reproduce the issue by rebuilding a machine with
Russian Windows XP SP2 and English Office 2003 SP2 with Russian MUI.

The detailed behaviour is as follows:
* Add-in installation happens as normal. No errors or anything unusual.

* When I run Excel after installation, the menu the add-in creates
during OnStartupComplete does not appear.
* If you go to the COM add-in dialogue, the name of the add-in is shown
loaded and checked. The Load Behaviour message reads "Load at startup".

* If you go to the Diabled items dialogue (Help -> About -> Disabled
items), you don't get any items listed.
* In the Registry, the value of LoadBehavior in the
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Excel\Addins\AddInShim.Connect key is 3.
Excel is not changing this value after running. It stays as 3.

I catch exceptions at OnStartupComplete and at OnConnection in this
manner:
try
{
// method logic
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
MessageBox.Show("Error at
OnStartupComplete/OnConnection");
}
but I don't get any error messages when Excel starts.

Everything seems to be working normally, except that the menu doesn't
show up. And the add-in works fine in English and Spanish versions of
Excel. It only fails (so far) in Office versions with MUI in Russian,
Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese.

My COM add-in uses a shim as described in this article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnoxpta/html/odc_comshim.asp

I'm using .NET Framework 2.0 and I built the add-in (and the shim) with
Visual Studio 2005. The add-in was written in C#.

Has anybody else seen this issue and know a solution?

Thanks a lot in advance,
A.
 

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