I have had Visio 2010 Premium, on my Windows 7 machine, for many years and it has been great. However, recently there are some issues. The simplest way to cause the issue takes just these steps:

1. Create a new drawing
2. Drag a shape, like a circle, onto the canvas
3. Select Fill->Fill Options and change the fill pattern to anything and Visio crashes.

Looking in the Event Viewer, this is the error I see for the crash:
So, I decide to look at user32.dll and I found multiple copies. Here are the details:
C:\Windows\erdnt\cache64 - 2010-11-20, 1,000,128 byte, V6.1.7601.17514
C:\Windows\erdnt\cache86 - 2010-11-20, 833,024 byte, V6.1.7601.17514
C:\Windows\system32 - 2020-01-29, 1,010,688 byte, V6.1.7601.24546
C:\Windows\syswow64 - 2020-01-29, 834,560 byte, V6.1.7601.24546

What strikes me as odd are that there are multiple versions and that two of them are a decade newer than the others. I am wondering if I were to replace the newer version of user32.dll with the older version if that might resolve the issue? Any thoughts and/or suggestions?


p.s. I just ran this same version of Visio on a Windows 10 machine and the version of user32.dll is very different there, and it ran without issue.

Your guess is probably better than mine...

It doesn't look like too big a drama to test the old version. Or grab the version off the other machine and give that one a try too.

An outside option might be to see if the monitor drivers are up to date - the crash may be related to the monitor driver.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

I figured that I would try copying the older versions into System32 and SysWOW64. I copied the older files to the desktop, renamed them to old<dir>_user32.dll, and then moved them into System32 and SysWOW64. I know that these are protected files, so I rebooted into safe mode and cd’ed to the System32 folder. My plan was to delete the user32.dll file (yes, I first copied it someplace safe) and then rename the old<dir> file. However, when I tried to deleted user32.dll, I was told “Access denied”. Now what can I try?

I created a SLAX bootable USB drive, booted to SLAX, copied the older user32.dll files into their 'active' locations - but that did nothing. Exact same crash - now what do I try?