Outlook: error when quickly unloading/loading com addin

[tingletanglebob]

Hi,

we shipped in May a vb.net 2003 com-addin for outlook which does various
stuff. Now, the customer complains about the following:

When closing outlook und immidiately open outlook again (you have to have an
shortcut right under the x button to reproduce) you will see "The Operation
failed". But only when a com add in is installed. You can reproduce this with
any com add in (e.g. I installed the outlook backup addin from Microsoft as
well to test) or any other addin.

Now I don't want to argue whether this complaint is kind of ridiculous
(since when you wait a few seconds before opening outlook again everything is
ok). but the customer is convinced that there is a cure for this behaviour
and I was hoping that someone of you guys has a sound explanation for this
error (or cure). (Well I can figure out myself that resources need to be
freed up etc., but I meant a conclusive explanation may be with a link from a
MS web site).

Many thanks in advance

Patrick

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

The cure is a better customer.

Any addin takes some time to unload and a managed code addin takes longer
than unmanaged code due to the COM Interop and garbage collection. If a user
clicks to start again before Outlook has shut down they will get an error,
managed or unmanaged code addins or even with no addins depending on the
Outlook version. If it's a version with the MAPI spooler it takes a couple
of minutes for the spooler to shut down.