If you use Excel 2010 and your spreadsheets are suddenly acting strange—freezes, crashes for no apparent reason—you likely have Windows Automatic Update turned on. Last Tuesday, as part of its usual Patch Tuesday celebrations, Microsoft pushed a patch,KB3178690, that causes recalculations in Excel 2010 to freeze or crash the program.

The only solution at this point: Uninstall the patch.

Poster gneJim first raised the alarm on Thursday on the Microsoft Answers forum:

KB3178690 causing excel 2010 to crash

I have had to remove this update from approx. 4 machines (3x Win7, 1x Win10) this morning as Excel 2010 kept crashing out when trying to update SQL queries.

By Friday night, Microsoft employee Freya had confirmed the problem: