"This form requires Word as your e-mail editor..." error

M

Marie79

Why do I keep getting this error? The full error reads "This form requires
Word as your e-mail editor, but Word is either busy or cannot be found. The
form willl be opened in the Outlook editor instead."
I am using Outlook 2002. "Use Mircosoft Word to edit e-mail messages" box is
checked off in my Mail Format-Options, but when I try to reply to some (and
not all) messages from clients I get this error and the box is unchecked when
I go back into Mail Format-Options.
 
V

VanguardLH

Marie79 said:
Why do I keep getting this error? The full error reads "This form requires
Word as your e-mail editor, but Word is either busy or cannot be found. The
form willl be opened in the Outlook editor instead."
I am using Outlook 2002. "Use Mircosoft Word to edit e-mail messages" box is
checked off in my Mail Format-Options, but when I try to reply to some (and
not all) messages from clients I get this error and the box is unchecked when
I go back into Mail Format-Options.

Are you also using Word 2002 on the same host where you are using
Outlook 2002? The versions MUST match for integration to work.
 
M

Marie79

VanguardLH said:
Are you also using Word 2002 on the same host where you are using
Outlook 2002? The versions MUST match for integration to work.

Yes, they are the same versions...
 
V

VanguardLH

Marie79 said:
Yes, they are the same versions...

Are there multiple versions of MS Office installed on the same host,
like you have MS Office 2000 and MS Office 2002 both installed? In one
of them, Outlook must be removed (and Outlook reinstalled for the other
version). While multiple versions of MS Office can be concurrently
installed, there can only be 1 instance of any version of Outlook
installed at a time.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/284900
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319796
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/196871

MS Office has had a long-standing history of not unloading its processes
when the user tries to exit the application. After exiting Outlook (or
trying to), you might find outlook.exe is still listed in Task Manager's
Processes tab. If you are using Word as the e-mail editor (which
severely bloats the size of an e-mail, uses poor HTML coding, and
inserts directives that are only understood by Word so they are
worthless to non-Word e-mail reading users), Outlook loads winword.exe
so also check that process is gone after trying to exit Outlook (or even
after you are done creating an e-mail). If winword.exe hangs around
after you are done creating an e-mail then you have to kill the process.
If outlook.exe is still around after you exit Outlook, kill the process.
You might even find you have multiple copies of outlook.exe and/or
winword.exe still running when you thought you exited them all.

Some causes of the code stub remaining in memory are due to badly coded
add-ons. When Outlook loads, it also has to load all its installed and
enabled add-ons. If an add-on doesn't come up, the load of Outlook will
hang. When Outlook exits, it first has to unload all the add-ons that
were loaded. If an add-on won't unload, Outlook won't complete its
exit. However, even under a fresh install of Windows and a fresh
install of Office (or just Outlook), I've seen lingering outlook.exe
processes that had to be killed to get correct behavior for Outlook when
its next instance is loaded.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/196871

Some users have reported the problem goes away after a reboot but then
what they've done is get rid of those lingering stub processes that
interfere with subsequent use of Outlook and/or Word. Rather than
reboot, just kill them. Wait a minute after exiting the application
before killing it to allow it time to exit, especially if add-ons have
been installed. For example, if you installed the Personal Folders
Backup add-on, and if a backup is eligible when you exit Outlook, it
will keep Outlook loaded when you try to exit Outlook because the PFB
add-on needs some time to create backup copies of the .pst file. So how
long to wait to kill a lingering outlook.exe process (to determine if it
really will linger) depends on what add-ons you have installed for
Outlook.
 
B

Brian Tillman

Marie79 said:
Why do I keep getting this error? The full error reads "This form
requires Word as your e-mail editor, but Word is either busy or
cannot be found. The form willl be opened in the Outlook editor
instead."
I am using Outlook 2002. "Use Mircosoft Word to edit e-mail messages"
box is checked off in my Mail Format-Options, but when I try to reply
to some (and not all) messages from clients I get this error and the
box is unchecked when I go back into Mail Format-Options.

Try this: Click Start>Run and enter

regsvr32.exe ole32.dll

in the Open field and click OK.
 

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