SolidWorks and Office 365 (Validating License crash) - SOLVED

I am running SolidWorks 2022 SP3.1 on an M1 2020 MacMini running Windows 11. I have been using this install of Parallels to pretty much just run SolidWorks, and have been running since 2020 without issue.

I started a project where I needed to use Design Tables, and because of this, you need to have Excel installed. When I installed Office 365, my SolidWorks install broke. When launching the app, the splash screen crashes during the "Validating License" part of the load. After much trial and error, I was able to restore my SolidWorks install to function but at the expense of no longer having Office 365 installed. I even tried installing just Excel, but that didn't work either.

In order to restore SolidWorks to functioning, I had to completely uninstall Office 365, and also uninstall the four instances of Microsoft Visual C++ installs (mine were 2010 x64, 2010 x86, 2015-2019 x86, and 2019 (Arm64)). I then had to relaunch the SolidWorks installer and select the "Repair your installation" which basically just reinstalled the four Visual C++ instances, and then it started up just fine.

I tried the uninstall/reinstall trick with the C++ instances while not touching the installation of Office 365, but that still causes SolidWorks to crash on load. The only way to get SolidWorks to load is to unistall 365 and then uninstall/reinstall the C++ instances.

Anyone got any ideas? Right now, my workaround is to open SolidWorks, and while it's open, install Office 365. This allows me access to Design Tables but if I ever need to shut down SolidWorks, I have to go through the trouble of uninstalling and reinstalling, which as you can imagine is kind of a pain.

 

Hey Patrick! I am having this same issue on my Mac Book Pro M1 Pro. Let me know if you find a solution / workaround.

 

Hi Patrick, thanks for posting this. I was frustrated to no end, unsure why my install of Solidworks was not opening at all. Last week I also needed to use Excel for Windows so went through the process of installing Office 365. Went to load up Solidworks and it kept failing on the splash screen with no error message. If it wasn't for this post I would have never thought that the install of Office would cause Solidworks to fail...

Currently trying to reinstall solidworks as per your suggestion to fix the issue. Would be good if anyone at Parallels has an explanation or solution.

 

An update from my end:

I was unable to repair my install or install a new version of Solidworks - way too many errors - after deleting the C++ instances. I ended up ditching that instance of Windows, creating another in Parallels, and reinstalling Solidworks. All working fine now.

Really shows the power of virtual machines, very glad I can run Office 365 on the Mac side, and glad I didn't use Windows for anything other than Solidworks. This allowed me to drop and run when the complicated uninstall/reinstall/repair process on Windows. It got to the point where it wouldn't even let me uninstall Solidworks without me directing it to the right file path. I think it was for the installation files but I didn't have/couldn't find these.

Anyway, problem solved for now - just don't install Office 365 I guess.

 

My SolidWorks install was stopping on the registry step just after the licensing, but the above fix it
I had to remove Microsoft 365 and the programmes mentioned in the first post
Thanks for entering this post it was really helpful

 

Why not use Excel without 365. This works on intel machines in Windows

 

Just wanted to upvote the last Visual C++ Redistributable for Arm64 solution. Worked for me as well. Thank you so much for posting that!

 

Same upvote here - been scouring the net and watching that silly little splash screen disappear over and over again. TomO12's fix works!

 

echoing TomO12's solution solved my issue as well!. Thanks!

 

Had the same problem and tried Tom012's solution. It worked after trying his. Thanks

 

Perfect solution, and only thing that worked after many wasted hours, so thanks TomO12!