Microsoft Office's CiceroUIWndFrame component crashes Outlook

When Microsoft Outlook becomes unstable and crashes, it is usually due to third-party add-ins, corrupted user data, or bad interactions with other applications. Surprisingly, there is even a Microsoft Office component called CiceroUIWndFrame that can crash Outlook.

Since Microsoft Office components are installed by default, they are never explicitly investigated as being a possible source of an Outlook problem. But I've seen Microsoft Outlook crash with the error message placing the blame on

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"CiceroUIWndFrame," an Office component that end users are unlikely to recognize.

The error message description indicated that this was an internal name for some program component (and that turned out to be what it was). The CiceroUIWndFrame problem is directly associated with the presence of the Alternative User Input modules in Microsoft Office.

If you follow these steps, the CiceroUIWndFrame issues should stop:

  • Run Office's setup routine from Add/Remove Programs and look in the list of installed Office programs.

  • Select Office Shared Features -> Alternative User Input -> Speech and Handwriting.

  • Disable Speech and Handwriting.

NOTE: You may need to supply the Microsoft Office installation CD to complete this action. Also, it's best to do this on a clean boot and manually kill the process named ctfmon.exe before performing the changes to Office.

CiceroUIWndFrame is one of many issues that stem from Office's input-method add-ins. Another problem is an excessive slowdown when opening Microsoft Outlook email involving the IME (Input Method Editor).

About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of Windows Insight, a newsletter devoted to hints, tips, tricks, news and goodies for all flavors of Windows users.

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This was first published in August 2007

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