Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window.

There are two profiles on the Windows 7 RC laptop we are using at home, Monique’s and my own.

Monique’s Outlook is still humming along after Office 2007 SP2 while mine took a turn for the worst:

Microsoft Office Outlook

Cannot start Microsoft office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window.

There was nothing relevant that came up in our searches for a solution other than a suggestion to rebuild the local Outlook Profile.

To do that, delete the profile in the Mail properties that is available in the Control Panel in x86 (32bit) versions of Win7 or behind the Legacy 32bit Control Panel Icons in x64 (64bit) versions of Win7. The exact name of the legacy icon in Win7 x64 slips the mind at the moment but it is there.

When recreating the profile and the connection to a remote Exchange server as is the case here make sure to not click the Check Name button until after the Outlook Anywhere settings for the RPC/HTTPS connection have been set. A credentials prompt will happen once the button is clicked.

All SBS Outlook Anywhere credential prompts are formatted:

• SBSDomain\FirstLast
• My very l0ng password!

It took several runs at getting the profile to stick, but once the Exchange credentials prompt seemingly took the server name and the username were underlined in the Exchange Server e-mail profile window as per the following screenshot:

Note that the Use Cached Exchange Mode is unchecked. That is what we needed to do to get things working. We enabled Cached Mode once things started to work.

One of the drawbacks to having to rebuild my profile is its size due to the volume of e-mail that I deal with.

UPDATE 2010-06-30: As Marek suggested in the comments section, the proper way to fix this is to run the following command:

• XP: Start –> Run –> Outlook /resetnavpane
• Vista/7: Start –> Outlook /resetnavpane

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

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Outlook 2007 Error – The account you added is not fully configured…

While setting up a remote Outlook 2007 for Outlook Anywhere connectivity with Exchange back at the main office, the Internet connection went down.

Normally, this would not present too much of a problem, but in this case the connection died just after applying the RPC/HTTPS settings in the Connection tab but before the authentication dialogue popped up.

The Outlook connection dialogue hung at that point. After forcing a close, we tried to run the set up procedure again, but we would receive the following error as soon as we clicked on the More Settings button:

Microsoft Office Outlook

The account you added is not fully configured. It might not work properly until re-configured correctly.

A bit of searching for the specific error turned up the following:

• MS KB252304: Error message when you start Outlook: "Unable to open the Outlook window," "No profile has been created," or "The list of Profiles cannot be loaded"

While the article does not have the above specific error, when we tried to fire Outlook up we did get one of the error messages contained in the KB article when Outlook was trying to start.

Method 2 in the KB was the solution to our problem:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate one of the following registry keys, as appropriate for the version of Microsoft Windows that you are using:

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem

3. Delete the Profiles key under the Windows Messaging (Subsystem) key.
   To do this, right-click Profiles, and then click Delete. Click Yes to confirm the deletion.
4. Exit Registry Editor, and then restart Outlook.

Once we deleted the above indicated registry key, we were not able to run the account creation process via the Mail icon due to the fact that there were no longer any Outlook profiles on the system.

There will be a prompt to create one:

Outlook Profile Created

Once created, we could go on to put the SBS server FQDN in the Exchange server properties along with the user name and subsequently the Outlook Anywhere settings and have the user authenticate.

Once authenticated, the SBS server name and the proper user name were underlined as they should be and we were able to complete the setup process.

The user could then open their Outlook, authenticate and begin caching their mailbox locally.

When connecting via Outlook Anywhere (RPC/HTTPS), the logon credentials should be formatted:

• SBSDomain\UserName
• My very l0ng p@ssw0rd!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

Vista and Outlook 2007 Search Broken? Search results may be incomplete...

When things are crazy busy, we tend to put up with things until we have the time to fix whatever is nagging at us, or the problem is interfering with our workflow.

Well, this Outlook/Vista problem has been nagging for a while, though not to the point where it was interfering with things ... until yesterday.

Synnex (Search Results)

Search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed. Click here for more details.

It seems that the search feature was working fine at one point, then it became broken. A direct correlation cannot be pulled as far as the why things broke, but if memory serves correctly, Vista Service Pack 1 was the Anti-Trust modification for the search feature (Ars Technica) may be the culprit.

No matter what, and even on whichever Vista SP1 machine, the same results happened when searching for something in Outlook 2007.

Some Internet searching around did not turn up too much in the way of fixes for the problem. There are a number of somewhat relevant posts on the Vistax64 Forums with no real resolution to the problem.

The solution turned out to be to download the new Windows Search 4.0, install, reboot, and let the indexer run.

After the reboot, and a short time with the system online, the search results were as follows:

Synnex (Search Results)

Your search returned a large number of results. Narrow your search, or click here to view all results.

The time it took to index everything was relatively short.

And, now our searches work.

An update search in the WSUS v3 SP1 console for "Windows Search" or "KB940157" turned up nothing. Not sure why that is as we would like to deploy the update to our Vista installations. For now, we will run the update on all of our own Vista installs and link to it in a broadcast e-mail to our Vista based client users.

Finally, search works! :)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Business Contact Manager - Recovery via *.mdf and *.ldf only

We have a relatively new client that has been going through what is turning out to be a month long odyssey of getting their Lenovo X61 tablet working again.

After an initial diagnosis that the hard drive was failing, they made a backup of their data and the Lenovo on-site people showed up and swapped out the drives.

Two hard drives and three motherboards later, we need to get their Business Contact Manager (BCM) data back online.

One slight gotcha though: The only data we have to work with is the original MSSmallBusiness.ldf and MSSmallBusiness.mdf files.

How did we realize that we were facing a gotcha? When we went to import the data via the database management in BCM it did not give us the option to import a *.mdf file.

After some searching about, we came up with the following Business Contact Manager Team Blog post: Restoring a BCM database from SQL .mdf and .ldf files (Windows Vista or XP).

Noting comments in the post about the environment variable used in the script were for Vista, we made sure to point them to the physical files using the full path.

No matter how many ways that script was modified to get it to work, we could not get those files to mount.

This left us in a bit of a pickle. How do we proceed?

Note the command line structure in the script itself. It contains osql commands. And, we SBSers all know where we need the osql commands (previous blog post on taming SQL's memory usage) don't we?

A quick search for sql 2005 sp_attach_db leads us to: MS KB 224071: How to move SQL Server databases to a new location by using Detach and Attach functions in SQL Server.

Since our BCM database is already detached, we need only attach it again.

But, before we try that, we remove BCM off the system altogether.

After making sure that BCM was fully removed from the system, we reinstalled it.

Run services.msc to verify that the MSSSQL (MSSMLBIZ) database instance is up. Do not run Outlook yet because the BCM will try and initialize a new database during its setup phase.

The databases would be located in: C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\LocalSettings\Application Data\Microsoft\Business Contact Manager\MSSmallBusiness.mdf.

We copied the recovered database and log files into the above location.

From there, we ran the following at the command line (assume Enter after each line):

1. hostname (system will reply with the name of your computer)
2. osql -E -S MyComputer\MSSMLBIZ (assume MyComputer is your hostname)
3. use master
4. go
5. sp_attach_db 'MSSmallBusiness','C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Business Contact Manager\MSSmallBusiness.mdf','C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Business Contact Manager\MSSmallBusiness.ldf'
6. go
7. quit

Note that osql can be run from within the database folder because the SQL binn folder resides in the System Path.

Once we had a successful database and log file attach to the MSSMLBIZ instance and fired up Outlook, all of the BCM content was there.

We then imported the recovered PST file and our client was good to go.

UPDATE 2008-10-15: If you get an access denied error on the attach attempt then BCM is not installed properly. Run BCM, create a new set of dbs (generally MSSmallBusiness2), and then uninstall BCM, copy the original dbs into the directory, and attach again.

If you need help recovering your databases, please drop us a line: BCM Recovery.

UPDATE 2008-11-03: Added the hostname step to make sure you find the correct system name.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Outlook 2007 - Stalled Send and Receive

This is what Outlook has looked like all day today:

Outlook 2007: Stalled Send/Receive

Nothing seems to have fixed the issue short of a reboot. Shutting Outlook down as well as killing its process in the Task Manager did not do it. Cancelling the Send/Receive and clicking on the S/R button or F9 on the keyboard does not always bring in new email either.

Given time constraints, a reboot has not been possible since the last one. We need to get some work done on this machine!

So, hopefully the reboot, when it happens, will fix it for now.

The machine that Outlook is misbehaving on is due for a significant component upgrade. So, the OS and all applications will be reinstalled to see if a start from OS Ground Zero will resolve the Outlook issues on it.

*Sigh*

UPDATE 2007-01-17: Tried ripping Office 2007 right out of the system and allowing our GP install to run fresh. Problem is still there after the reinstall.

There are a number of other workstations here that can connect to that Exchange profile with no issues. The one difference is the POP3 pulls that happen on the one workstation with the problem. Yet, the POP3 pulls are accomplished with no hang ups. Only the Exchange portion seems to get hung up indefinitely.

Service Pack 1 has been deployed via WSUS and all workstations have it installed.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Outlook 2007 RSS Feeds not working ... partial reason found?

Outlook's inability to bring in RSS feeds on a regular basis is pretty nuts.

The whole process is hit and miss, as it rarely brings feeds down.

So far, there is no real indication about what is going on ... at least until this evening.

While watching the ISA Logging querying for "Denied" Actions only for another issue, a whole bunch of denies came through:

Outlook RSS Feed Poll blocked by ISA 2K4 on SBS

This doesn't make any sense.

Why is that? Because, the feeds do populate once in a Blue Moon.

To the Outlook Team: there is a clue to whatever is broken!

UPDATE: Previous post: Outlook 2007 - RSS feeds no longer work ... period! 0xB7AC0008.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Outlook 2007 - RSS feeds no longer work ... period! 0xB7AC0008

Usually when the RSS feeds being aggregated in Outlook no longer feed in, a reboot fixes it.

Well, several reboots later, nothing seems to be working.

Outlook keeps throwing 0xD07C0008, 0xD28C0008, 0xD49C0008, 0xD6AC0008, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum.


This is Outlook 2007 on Vista x64 connected to our SBS Exchange server.

So, the next step is to export all of the feeds, then import them again. Nope. Doesn't work.

So, what are the options from there? One is to delete them one by one. Then, import the OPML file again. What a tedious process. There is a very painful pause in between each one. This is oh so senseless.

So, after all of this, Outlook is pretty much unresponsive. This is after deleting two of the blog feeds. There is not enough time in the day to fix it.

So, time to throw in the towel. Are there any good RSS Readers that integrate into Outlook 2007? Or, perhaps a standalone reader. Free is not so important as the ability to sort the feeds by blog and perhaps a further sort by subject would be nice.

*sigh*

Okay, maybe I spoke too soon. Outlook seems to have recovered. I was able to delete the feeds in both IE and Outlook, and the feeds are coming back with no errors - or at least some of them are. Time will tell if they pick up or not.

This breakage is cyclic. There seems to be no rhyme or reason behind it. But, it just keeps happening!

The question above still stands though. Time to move on until Microsoft gets their collective Outlook stuff together and fixes the problem.

Previous post on the subject: Outlook 2007 - RSS Broken Feed Frustration.

UPDATE: As I sit here, there are no RSS feeds coming up. Anything that showed up stopped on the date, October 10 or thereabouts, that things stopped working. So, no fix. :(

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Office 2007 - Outlook Performance Patch KB933493

Here is a screen shot of my OST file (SBS Exchange 2003 SP2 integrated):


Yes, it is over a gigabyte. The second 800 MB OST file is the backup that was created when we did a Swing Migration to consolidate our multiple servers into one SBS server.

I have been having performance problems pretty much from day one of my Office 2007 install in Outlook 2007.

So, I have been keeping an eye out for updates for this and other Outlook issues.

Via the Exchange Team Blog, an update for Outlook can be found at the following Microsoft KB 932086: You may experience performance problems when you are working with items in a large .pst file or in a large .ost file in Outlook 2007.

This lead to KB 933493: Description of the update for Outlook 2007: April 13, 2007.

And, to the download patch here: Update for Outlook 2007 (KB933493) (.exe). Note, that validation will be required to download the update.

Vlad posted his bad experience this morning with this particular update: Why not to install Outlook 2007 Performance Patch (KB933493). So, I was pretty wary of the possibility of a broken Outlook after the patch.

I made sure to backup before beginning. Fortunately, the update took with no issues.

So, did the update work? On an initial observation, the answer is a profound YES!

So far, e-mail is actually opening when I click on it. Before the update, it would take anywhere up to 30 seconds before an e-mail would open up, be deleted, or a group would delete.

Thus, in my opinion, this update is good to go.

This is my previous blog post on Outlook Performance Issues.

UPDATE 07-04-25: The above link to Vlad's blog has since been removed and replaced by: Vladville volcano NOT related to 933493.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

Office 2007 - Outlook Performance on XP - Outlook 2007 Bug

A while back, I blogged about my having performance issues with Office 2007, specifically Outlook 2007, on XP versus Vista.

It seems that there is a documented bug in Outlook 2007 that causes a huge impact on performance that is tied into the POP3 email receive being broken.

Roundtrip Solutions Blog has the lowdown on it here.

It now makes sense as to why the huge difference. The Vista machine is running Outlook via RPC/HTTPS to our SBS Exchange server here in the office. So, no POP3 accounts are setup on that system.

The machine here in the office is connected to our company's SBS Exchange server internally, but is also pulling e-mail for my other company accounts via POP3 from the same Exchange server. It makes it easier to sort e-mail coming in that way, and the POP3 connection remains behind ISA with accounts that are setup only for e-mail.

So, now we wait for Microsoft to fix the issue!

Thanks to David Overton for the original head's up here.

And, I stand corrected on my original assessment of Office performance on XP versus Vista! ;)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

Outlook 2007 - OLMAPI32.DLL Error

We are just finishing up a fresh SBS 2K3 R2 Premium install.

Our clients obtained Office 2007 Enterprise via Software Assurance. A really good deal when one gets to see just how much extra is included btw.

Still haven't worked out O2K7 installation via Group Policy yet. But, that is another post...

All of the machines installed the same except for one. On that one, when I fired up Outlook I received the OLMAPI32.DLL Error.

Nothing more, nothing less. Just that one little button with an OK!

After some searching, it was discovered that one needed to remove any previous versions of Outlook and/or Office. Well, I chose the REMOVE ALL PREVIOUS VERSIONS during the install process.

So, I assumed that there was nothing there!

WRONG...

Not only was there something there in the Add/Remove Programs group, the Office XP install/remove program would no longer work!

I downloaded the Office XP/2002 Resource Kit to obtain the Removal Utility. That didn't work.

Fortunately, our client has the original install disks. I ran the Office XP install, rebooted, and then with the Office XP installation struggle out of the picture, to then UNINSTALL it again!

After a reboot, Outlook would not fire up. I received the same error.

I then had to head to the control panel, add-remove programs, click on Office 2007, and then the change button.


Hit the Add/Remove button, then on the next screen make sure to click on the very top option and "Run All on My Computer"


Once the install process has finished, viola! You will have a now working installation of Office Outlook 2007!

Thanks to the TechNet Forums , specifically Beverly's post on page 1, and Harry's on page 2 that helped me to work through this one.

App: Office 2007 Enterprise

OS: Windows XP SP2 English.

Happy Office 2007 installing!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists.