Outlook reverting back to standard form instead of custom form - only on some records

[Stacey]

Hi,

I have a com add-in to Outlook 2003 that among other things uses a custom
version of the contact form. The functionality had been working properly
for months, but recently certain contact forms have started opening up in
the standard contact form instead of my custom one. If you look at the
properties for these records, the message class is still set to the custom
one. Once you open a contact record and it comes up in the old form, it
always opens up in that form from then on. There seems to be no pattern to
the contact records this is happening on. We have uninstalled office,
uninstalled the add-in, deleted the custom forms, deleted the profile and
reinstalled everything but it did not fix it. It continued to happen on the
previous problem contact records and new records have now become problems.
No error messages are generated.

Environment details:
Outlook 2003 Professional
receives email from a hosted Exchange Server 2003
Windows XP SP2

The add-in was developed in VB.NET using Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Please help! I am at a loss as to how this is happening and how to correct
it.

Thanks,
Stacey

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

That sounds like a forms cache corruption issue. See the information at
www.outlookcode.com on clearing the forms cache and see if that helps.

 

[Stacey]

Hi,

No, we cleared the forms cache via the Outlook button and then deleted the
frmcache.dat file when we uninstalled Outlook and deleted the profiles.

So far this issue has been very random - some records open with the correct
form and some do not.

Thanks,

Stacey

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

Any size differences between the ones that open correctly and the ones that
don't?

 

[Stacey]

Sorry for the delayed response. This is a an issue for one of our customers
and getting access to their machine is sometimes challenging.

No, there is no size differences between the ones opening correctly and ones
that are not. There are contact records that are larger and some that are
smaller. The user has about 1300 contact records. There is no visible
message class difference between the ones that work and the ones that do
not, i.e., Outlook is not changing the message class when it opens up the
contact record in the standard form.

 

[Stacey]

Correction, the use has 3533 records and this problem has happened to less
than a dozen so far.

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

I meant size as the size of the item in bytes, not the physical size of the
form when it's opened. I'm not sure I was clear enough in what I said.

Were any changes made recently to the form design?

 

[Stacey]

Yes, I understood your question in size of bytes. All of the contact
records use the same form so the physical size of the form when opened
should be identical. The size of the contact record is typically around 2k,
but some are only 1k and some are larger. The corrupted forms do not differ
in size from the ones that did not.

There have been a few minor changes made to the form, primarily any changes
have been made to the logic behind the forms (using Visual Studio .NET
2003). The records corrupted seem to be older ones, not any recently
created. The form definition is not stored with the forms. Could Outlook
be trying to grab an older version of the form and not finding it (instead
of using the latest version) and therefore be reverting to the standard?
It's strange that it's not changing the message class if that were the case.
In the year that this person has been a customer of ours, there have been
probably a half a dozen form updates. The forms are stored in the Personal
Forms folder and not at the Organization level.

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

I can see that happening if the changes were made with no changes to the
Version property. That's a common cause of what you're seeing but usually is
fixed by clearing the forms cache. In cases like that the older form might
be picked up from the forms cache.

If a form is one-offed to use a specific forms description then it's usually
much larger, say 10's or 100's of K's in size. Small variations in size are
usually due to differences in the data in the items.

 

[Stacey]

Okay, we have fixed the issue on the clients computer. We manually deleted
all of the forms that were on the computer (from the folders, not via
Outlook) and then republished the correct form (with an incremented version
number). Many of the old forms did not have version numbers and possibly
this was causing the problem.