HELP! Viewing/opening messages crashes Outlook 2007

[Gareth]

I have Outlook 2007 running on a new Dell Dimension 9200 PC with Windows
Vista Ultimate. It was all working fine for past two weeks when I closed
down my PC last night, and I had not installed any new software or updates
since. I now find I can forward or reply to messages OK, but if I try to
just read them them in the reading pane, Outlook immediately says it has
stopped working and restarts. It then opens without the reading pane
enabled, but if I double-click a message to read it (without the reading
pane enabled), it again crashes and restarts.

I have spent all morning on the phone with Dell Support but they have been
unable to fix it. I have tried disabling all Outlook add-ins. I did have
Acrobat Pro v8 installed with it's add-ins (not causing any problems up to
now) but I uninstalled the Acrobat Plugin for Outlook via Add/Remove
programs, but it has made no difference. I have run scanpst.exe - no
problems found; have run Office Diagnostics - no problems found. Have tried
repairing Office 2007, and lastly completely uninstalled Ofiice 2007,
rebooted, and re-installed Office 2007 - but on opening Outlook I still have
the same problem.

This is very frustrating, and on searching Google, the Microsoft
Knowlegebase, and these forums, I've only found one similar report - but no
solution (The person who submitted the other report of this says he directly
knows of 6 other people who've experienced the same problem). By the way, I
don't have Exchange or any Symantec products installed.

Are any of you able to update me on this issue or suggest a solution. I'm
desparate ;¬(

Thanks

(Please reply to group as e-mail address is bogus to prevent spam)

 

[TechieBird]

It could be that the form used to display standard mail is messed up.

Try clearing the forms cache - Tools > Options > Other > Advanced Options >
Custom Forms > Manage Forms > Clear Cache.

 

[Gareth]

Thanks for suggestion, but tried that and it's made no difference. Any otehr
suggestions?

 

[TechieBird]

Three suggestions that might help narrow this down...

1. Does it work OK if you run Outlook in Safe Mode (hold the CTRL key down
when you launch Outlook)? If so, let me know and I'll give you some more
things to try.

2. If the answer is to 1 is No, do Word and Internet Explorer work OK on
this machine for opening basic documents and web pages respectively? If not,
what problems/errors do you get?

3. If the answer to 2 is Yes, try using SCANPST to check your Personal
Folders file for errors. (I presume you're using a PST.) See
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/272227.

 

[Gareth]

Three suggestions that might help narrow this down...

1. Does it work OK if you run Outlook in Safe Mode (hold the CTRL key
down
when you launch Outlook)? If so, let me know and I'll give you some more
things to try. No, same problem in safe mode.

2. If the answer is to 1 is No, do Word and Internet Explorer work OK on
this machine for opening basic documents and web pages respectively? If
not,
what problems/errors do you get? Word and IE work fine.

3. If the answer to 2 is Yes, try using SCANPST to check your Personal
Folders file for errors. (I presume you're using a PST.) See
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/272227.

As previously mentioned have run scanpst and microsoft diagnostics several
times, and no problems found.

Grrrrr, this is very frustrating!

 

[TechieBird]

My apologies for not referring back to your original post.

If you haven't already tried a new mail profile, you should. It's not a
very likely fix as reading pane settings aren't stored in the mail profile,
but it's fairly quick and painless to try and it might just work.

You should also try with a new Windows profile - don't delete your own just
yet, try creating a new user first, make a copy of the PST in a location that
profile can get to, and set up your mail profile to point to that PST.

Both very general steps, I'm afraid, but if the problem is anywhere in your
Outlook settings (fingers crossed it isn't in system-wide Outlook settings)
then it should work, even if it is a major pain to get everything else in a
new profile set up as you want it.

Sorry I haven't been able to come up with anything better so far (

 

[Gareth]

Hi TechieBird

Just to update you, creating a new Outlook mail profile and then moving all
my messages from the old profile to the new one appears to have reolved the
problem. Actually, before I could try this myself, Dell Software support
contacted me to try to help solve the problem and after trying a few other
ways to fix it, he took me through setting up a new mail profile. Not as
quick a fix as I'd have liked, as I am having to spend ages copying over the
contents of all my old mail folders into the new profile (I've a LOT of
saved mail with a PST file over 2Gb in size!) but I'm ceratinly glad to have
resolved the problem at last.

Thanks and well done for suggesting this solution. :¬)