Office 2003 acting VERY strangely!!

[Rebecca]

I've had Office 2003 installed on my laptop since March 2007 and it has
worked beautifully--until yesterday. Now I never know what the navigation
panes are going to look like. Yesterday I noticed one of my inboxes listed
under the "My Calendars" section in the Calendar navigation pane. Nothing I
did could delete it nor could I figure out how it got there in the first
place. I also noticed the Calendar icon in my "Favorite Folders" section
which I couldn't delete. I fiddled and fussed with it to no avail. This
morning when I turned on my laptop and opened Office, the inbox in "My
Calendars" had been replaced by another inbox (I have 3) and the Calendar
icon had disappeared from Favorite Folders but so had my main Inbox. I did
the "Detect and Repair" bit (which I had also done yesterday), but it didn't
fix my problems, so I completely deleted my partially missing email account
and re-created it. I closed Outlook and re-opened it and voila, I had my
email account back but I also had the Calendar icon back in the Favorite
Folders pane as well as having the original inbox that was in the "My
Calendars" section back in that section!!

I looked to see if I had downloaded an update to Office the last couple of
days, but the last time I updated anything for Office was 1/15/09. I am
about to do a clean install of Vista since I have had nothing but grief
since SP1 came down the pike and I just went out and bought a portable hard
drive to save all my stuff on, but the last thing I want to do is save the
Office settings when they're this wonky. I've never had any problems with
Office before, so this has me totally mystified (not to mention frustrated).

Help anyone???

TIA,

Rebecca

 

[DL]

What type of Mail Accounts, pop,IMAP ? etc

Grief, depends to a certain extent on what you install/run on your PC and
your hardware, eg installing drivers from MS Update is in most circumstances
a definate no no

 

[Rebecca]

They're all imap accounts. It's just so weird. Like I said, Outlook has
been working perfectly since March '07 and now, out of the blue, it's acting
up.

I do the Windows update but I always check it before downloading since there
are some items I'm not interested in. I have updated all the drivers that
could be updated by going back to the source--Dell--or the driver
manufacturer. While I'm dreading all the work ahead of me doing this "clean
install" of Vista SP1, I'm also looking forward to having a machine that
performs decently (keeping my fingers crossed on that one). I'm so sick of
all the BSODs, slow responses, errors galore, etc., that I reluctantly
agreed with the MS Tech Support fellow and opted to go back to the
beginning. We shall see...

 

[DL]

You might want to run the hd testing utility obtained from the hd
manufacturers site, also a memory test, www.memtest.org