Outlook Issues
So I have recently been using outlook to combine my school email account with my Gmail account. Because I am a student I got a pretty good deal on Office 2007 ultimate through Microsoft (totally legal I swear). I hadn’t really had any problems with it until recently when I tried to open Outlook and I got a “Cannot open Microsoft Office Outlook. Outlook window failed to Open” error. Very helpful error by the way, don’t you just love Microsoft’s error messages? I hate having to redo the profiles for each of the email addresses as I have to use Google to find the pages that tell me the server information. I figured I would try to fix it instead of reinstall it and hope that it worked again when I was done.
There are a couple of programs that you get when you install Outlook that can help you if you ever do have problems with Outlook, Scanpst and Scanost. They are both found at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12 directory. They are pretty straight forward to use. Go to the directory and double click on the link. From there navigate to where you pst file is kept which is usually C:\Documents and Settings\User-Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook where User-Name is your user-name and click okay.
After I ran those it still didn’t fix the problem so I searched on-line and found out that supposedly sometimes an XML file that outlook creates errors out which causes Outlook to not open properly. The file is found at C:\Documents and Settings\User-Name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook (with User-Name again being your User-Name) and is called Outlook.xml. Just delete that and restart Outlook. If any of the folders listed above aren’t found try to unhide folders. You can do this by going to tools in the folder browser then clicking on Folder Options. In the window that opens up, click on the tab that says View. Towards the top is a section that says Hidden Files or Folders. Choose the Show hidden files and folders option. Be careful as you don’t really want to be deleting to many of the hidden stuff if you don’t know what it is. I hope that this helps some people. If you have any questions feel free to ask and if I can help I will.
