Yesterday, in Beware the Latest Office 2013 Updates, we told you about how KB2817630 caused an issue for a massive number of Microsoft customers where after installing the update, the Folder Pane in Outlook 2013 would show as blank.
Today, we told you about how KB2817630 has been silently pulled and that Microsoft was yet to supply information on why it was pulled and when an updated patch would be available.
Just a few minutes ago, Microsoft finally took to the Office blog site to officially announce the removal of the patch from this month's updates, explain what the issue actually is, and to reiterate the proper channels of reporting problems with patches.
In the post, Microsoft says:
Due to a version incompatibility between outlook.exe and mso.dll, a mismatched reference to a data structure causes the “Minimize” button in the navigation pane to render incorrectly, typically extremely large to the point that the navigation pane is "invisible" to the user. The issue only manifests when incompatible versions of outlook.exe and mso.dll exist on the system.
Incidentally, only Office 2013 Standard and Office 2013 Professional Plus were affected. Go figure that none of the Cloud versions of Office were affected, given that Microsoft is on the march as a "Cloud First" development crew.
Read the full post that describes the different scenarios for the issues and the specific steps for resolving the problems:
Outlook 2013 Folder Pane Disappears After Installing September 2013 Public Update
