Hi Ben,
Ah interesting, this thread has gone off in multiple ways so back the original.
Microsoft updated their MAPI dll in which they deprecated the SimpleMAPI API's to and Extended set of API's. Originally the broke exporting to MAPI so we updated our export routines to use the new Extended Set of API's. But their should not have been any front end app changes required.
So what likely has happened is the Mircosoft dependencies CR uses, one of them being USP10.dll and GDIPlus.dll ( .NET SDK Only ), CR Designer uses GDI.dll.
CR uses a specific version located in our folders, in CR Designer you'll actually see both versions loaded in Help, About... More info, 1.4 (CR) and 1.6 (Office).
If there are others I don't know off hand what they may be or what MS did you break and then fix the issue.
So, Windows is updated often along with MS Office, what they may have "fixed" is hard to say, you could read the notes from every patch you installed and possibly find the root cause but not worth it.
As long as it's all working now that's great.
Going forward it's still better to bring the reports and dependencies up to date, more work to do so but mostly out of our control. CR has hardware and software dependencies so if third party applications update and do not support backward compatibilities it unfortunately shows up in CR.
All we can do is try to keep up as best we can.
That is why there is a PAM ( Product Availablity Matrix ) it shows what our Developers and QA teams are using and testing with. You can find it on help.sap.com
And IE no longer allows me to insert links... another result of updates.
Don