[German]Users are complaining that since the June 2025 updates, Microsoft Excel has been causing problems and freezes on startup or is very slow to open and close. The cause may be Trend Micro version 6.7.3981/14.3.1311.
Liam W. contacted me by email last week (unfortunately got caught in the spam filter, sorry) and wrote: "Maybe something for the blog to help other admins who are currently desperately looking for a solution.
Reader note about Excel problems
Liam has had several customers complaining about slow opening/closing and poor performance in Excel. Sometimes Excel simply freezes. There is a German blog post Patchday: Microsoft Office Updates (10. Juni 2025), to which this comment thread belongs. There are complaints about Excel misbehaving when opening documents. But nothing about crashes or slow opening and closing.
Findings on the Internet
A search quickly brings up the reddit.com post Excel Slow / Locking – June 2025, which was also mentioned by Liam.
The thread starter is complaining that his Microsoft Excel 365 Enterprise is blocked after the June 2025 Patch Tuesday. The program freezes and has long startup times. According to this user, he has several end users with the same complaints.
Adobe PDF Maker as a problem
The affected person writes on reddit.com that the Adobe PDF Maker of the latest Adobe Reader could be the problem. The loading time of Excel seo dropped from 30 seconds to 2 seconds after he deactivated the Adobe PDF Maker. In tests on 5 machines, removing this add-in reduced the slow Excel startup (from 30 seconds to 2 seconds). And loading blank pages was fixed from 10-15 seconds to opening immediately. The following program is said to be the cause:
"C:\Programme\Adobe\Acrobat DC\PDFMaker\Office\x64\PDFMOfficeAddin.dll"
in version 25.1.20531.0 from June 6, 2025. Liam also found the article and was able to fix the performance issues in Excel.
Trend Micro Worry Free Business (TM WFBS) as a problem
Removing the above add-in was only partially successful. . At some point, the customer came back to Liam and complained that Excel was reacting extremely slowly again. Liam then searched further and came up with a final solution, which can be found in this reddit.com thread.
Excel 365 freezes are also complained about there. Trend Micro's WFBS agent version 6.7.3981/14.3.1311 is causing the problem. Liam wrote "I think Trend Micro has already withdrawn the update because I only have a few agents with this version." After a reinstallation, version 6.7.3981/14.3.1299 installed again and the problem in Excel was resolved. After publishing the German edition of this blog post last week, a reader also confirmed this observation.
