Outlook 2003 Not Responding

[MR-KEN]

Exchange 5.5 SP4 on Windows 2000 SP4
Outlook 2003

We have been upgrading users from OL2K to OL2K3 and everything was going
fine. One one install, OL2K3 just hung with a "Not Responding" label in the
Task Manager. This is also happening in my test lab, though at the time, I
figured it was just a test misconfiguration. RPC Ping returns successful
responses and OL2K on the same client works fine. Other OL2K3 users work
fine.

Any ideas?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Have you recreated the mail profile already?
Control Panel-> Mail-> button Show Profiles...

--
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[MR-KEN]

Newly created profiles have the same issue.

I have since totally uninstalled Office then installed it again and it seems
to work. I think this may have been an issue with multiple versions of
Office being loaded (2000/XP/Outlook 2003) and perhaps not being
un/installed completely/properly. I know that you cannot have multiple
version of OL running on a single machine, so perhaps something wasn't
uninstalled all the way during the upgrade with regards to OL related files.

I still would like some way to resolve this should it happen with out having
to uninstall Office (or have some confirmation that this was the problem).
I have a FileMon log that displays the problem when it was happening, but I
don't know if that would be of any use.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

What is logged to the Event Viewer?

--
Roady [MVP]
www.sparnaaij.net
Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office related News
Also Outlook FAQ, How To's, Downloads and more...

Tips of the month:
-Create your own fully customized Toolbar
-Creating a Classic View in Outlook 2003
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address when mailing)

 

[MR-KEN]

Nothing is logged into the Event Viewers logs. To recap, when creating a
new profile in this condition, the profile name will take a minute to
resolve to the mailbox name after doing a check name, but it does resolve.
Next, when you open the mailbox, after a long wait it will give you the
message stating that the Exchange server is unavailable. When you hit
Retry, it will sit there for many minutes, OL will indicate that it is Not
Responding, but mail may (or may not) start to appear (assuming Online
mode). Regardless, OL is unusable at during this condition.

There must be some DLL or something that is in conflict after Office is
installed/upgraded.

 

[Bob Qin [MSFT]]

Hi Ken,

Thanks for your posting here.

Does the Outlook 2003 hang when open Outlook or exist Outlook program?

In general, we can try the following steps to narrow down the issue.

Step #1
======

Start Outlook in Safe Mode

1. Click Start, and click Run.

2. In the Open box, type: "Outlook /safe" (without the quotation marks).

Notes: There is a space character between Outlook and the forward slash (/).

3. Click OK.

4. If the problem doesn't occur this time, please select
Tools->Options->Other->Advanced Options->COM-Add-Ins and then remove all
the
add-ins, then select Tools->Options->Other->Advanced Options->Add-In
Manager and
remove all the add-ins.

5. Restart Outlook to see if the problem is resolved.

If the problem is still there, try step 2.

Step #2
======

Rename the Cache Files

Search for the following four files and rename them by changing the file
extension
from ".dat" to ".old". These four files are temporary cache files that
Outlook 2003
loads on startup. (Be sure to check the "Search hidden files and folders"
box under
"More advanced options")

outcmd.dat

extend.dat

frmcache.dat

views.dat

Generally the files can be located in the folder C:\Documents and
Settings\<LogName>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\ If
they are
not there, please perform a whole system search for them.

Note: The folder is hidden by default. Please use the following method to
show
it:

1. From the Start menu, go to Settings-->Control Panel-->Folder Options.

2. Go to View tab and select "Show hidden files and folders". The hidden
folder
will be shown then.

3. Start Outlook to see if the problem is resolved.

Have a nice day!

Regards,
Bob Qin
Product Support Services
Microsoft Corporation

Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security

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[MR-KEN]

None of those options seemed to help. In further testing, I have found that
uninstalling and reinstalling seems to be a hit and miss, as I cannot get
OL2K3 to work at all. For my sanity, I reloaded an Image and installed
OL2K3 and I was able to connect to several mailboxes from the same profile.
I can only conclude that there is something that remains on the system that
is causing OL2K3 to act erratically. Uninstalling Office still leaves
residue on the system, so somthing is causing this problem.

 

[Dennis Watson]

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 219423 "How to Completely Remove
Microsoft
Office" might be useful?

Cheers,
DennisW