Office 2013 Issue: Installing Office 2013 breaks Visual Studio 2012

After installing Office 2013 on a machine with Visual Studio 2012 you get a “The procedure entry point _Atomic_fetch_sub_4 could not be located in the dynamic link library c:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0Common7IDEdevenv.exe” error when trying to load Visual Studio 2012.

Figure: _Atomic_fetch_sub_4 exception

Some of my colleagues ran into this.

Applies To

• Visual Studio 2012 RC (11.0.50522.1)
• Office 2013 Preview

Finding

This is a C++ runtime conflict between Visual Studio 2012 RC and Office 2013 Preview.

This update addresses incompatibility issues that are caused by installing later versions of the C++ Runtime on a machine with Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate. The update ensures that the Visual Studio executable file loads the compatible C++ Runtime DLLs in the app-local directory instead of loading the incompatible C++ Runtime DLLs that are installed by other applications in the system-wide directories.
- KB2703187

You will not be able to run Visual Studio until you have installed a patch.

Workarounds

In order to prevent this error you should install the July 2012 update for Visual Studio 2012 RC prior to installing Office 2013 Preview.

Figure: Install the July 2012 Update for Visual Studio 2012

If you did not install it first and you are unable to launch Visual Studio 2012 then you should download the July 2012 update from the Microsoft downloads site and install it manually.

Figure: Install July 2012 Update

I found that this does not affect Visual Studio 2012 installs that already have a previous update on Windows 8, but does affect vanilla Release Candidate installs.

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