Outlook Startup and COM addin initialization problem

[Scott McBurney]

We have customers experiencing what appears to be a bug in Outlook XP (and I
believe 2003).

We have a COM Addin, but we register it under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of
HKEY_CURRENT_USER - that way all users of a machine get the addin, and they
cannot remove it.

Anyway, when some users come in in the morning, they log into their
machines, and put their pocket pc onto its cradle to sync. This apparently
starts the Outlook object model, but no Outlook user interface.

Then at some point later, they start Outlook from the Icon on their desktop
or a menu item.

When starting this way, our addin is never loaded and never recieves any of
the IDTEXTENSIBILITY2 events. The only way to get the addin running is to
shut down outlook, disconnect the Pocket PC, and then start outlook again.
This time our addin starts up just fine.

Any suggestions how to cure this? Is this a known issue with outlook? Its
very easy to reproduce.

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

It's common to all versions of Outlook and occurs with almost any synch
software. The AddInMon.exe helper program that can be downloaded from the
MicroEye Web site from the Resources page (www.microeye.com) was developed
for that reason.

We recently found a bug in AddInMon related to recent versions of
ActiveSynch that we're looking at but it appears so far that the AddInMon
approach will have to be abandoned in favor of an inline approach due to the
main Outlook window (rctrl_renwnd32) being closed also in conditions you
mention.

We're working now on the inline approach and some instances of it are being
tested in the wild. We haven't been able to make it work in .NET addins yet
so for the moment the approach is only for COM addin using COM. When we
prove out the new code it will be posted at Microeye and at my Web site as
part of a larger replacement for the ItemCB sample COM addin that is now
posted at Microeye. That will have many extra features that the current
ItemCB doesn't have, such as Inspector and Items collections wrappers and
handling for WordMail.