Well there appears to be a new bug with Access in which external images no longer appear in the Ribbon.  I am not 100% sure when the bug came to be, but this morning when I opened a couple of my databases (using Access 2013) I found:

Examining the Ribbon XML I came to determine that all the built-in imageMso continue to display fine, but external images such as a png, no longer display.

Just to be 100% clear, all the buttons did have images appearing just fine previously and no changes have been made to these databases in years.

I posted this on the Answers forum and Tom van Stiphout was kind enough to reproduce and confirm my findings.  After further testing, it was determined that the cause for the images not appearing in his case was different than mine.

I haven’t checked to see if this issue is more generalized, in that it applies to all of Office or is localized, only impacts Access.

What is more alarming to me is that this machine is set to never install updates!  So can someone explain to me how things could have changed?!  Truly makes me wonder what is going on behind the scenes with our computers that we aren’t aware of.  I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but something is smelling very fishy with this whole situation.  Of course another potential explanation could be some type of code which involve a date/time component?!  Maybe????  I hope…!

Further tests seem to show that the issue is limited to only Access 2013.  When I opened the same database on Access 2010 & 2016 the ribbon displays just fine.

Update 2016-09-04

Went through the standard troubleshooting steps.

• Decompile ..
• New Blank db  and import everything …
• …

Finally performed an MS Office Repair and the images are displaying again.  I’d love to understand what triggered the actual problem, the true root cause (what could have messed around with dlls, registry keys, … to the point of making the ribbon non-functional and why is the ribbon so fragile in the first place), but at least whatever it is/was has been resolved.  Let’s just hope it doesn’t happen again, or to any of my end-users.  At least now I know what to try first to resolve the problem.