Outlook 2003 Won't Open

Question

We have a new Insperion E1705 which we just got a couple of days ago. My wife has spent a lot of time getting her Outlook contacts updated and everything was fine till this morning. Outlook fired up and quickly gave a message about a serious error and mentioned addons. Unfortunately my wife can't quote the message exactly. We only got the error message once. We are running XP Pro and PC Cillin is installed including on the Outlook tool bar. We've run the repair tool scanpst.exe which we found from another post on this forum. It found some errors, fixed them, but Outlook still won't run. BTW, I'm still looking for a phone number to call Dell with. There was nothing in any of the printed doc that I could find. Anyone have a number we can call. We've got the Dell On CAll for 30 Days, but how do I call them? Thanks for your help. johnny

abach · Answer

Try opening Outlook in safe mode. Start, Run, type: Outlook /safe Click OK The number for your on call is 1-866-497-2661

abach · Answer

Try the following: outlook /cleanprofile

jangell · Answer

Thanks for the suggestion. We just tried it with the same results. It opens and then closes, very quickly. If you've got other ideas, let us know. Will call the phone number you gave. Thanx. johnny

abach · Answer

It removes invalid profile keys and recreates default registry keys where applicable. Think of it like a chkdsk.

jangell · Answer

What will cleanprofile do? johnny

jangell · Answer

When the last suggestion was sent for cleanprofile, we were already talking to a Dell Tech. He had us uninstall Office and re-install, didn't fix it. We eventually used the Dell utility that lets you restore the pc back to out-of-the-box status.

Well, yeah that fixed it. Starting from scratch will do that. It turns out that we had installed Mobil Phone Tools from Motorola shortly before we had the problem. As soon as we installed it again, the problem reappeared, except that it never gave the error message.

So we uninstalled MPT, and outlook worked, without reinstalling Office. This is odd, since I run MPT on my desktop using Win XP Pro, and Office Pro and have no problems. The laptop on which we are having the problem is running Win XP Pro and Office Small Business Edition. They should both be running the same version of Outlook, I presume.

Go figure.

abach · Answer

I sometimes wish I could charge for telling someone to use the restore disk to fix a problem (only kidding, of course)

Apparently, the add-in conflicts with Outlook, and it may be caused by another program, such as an antivirus or something similar.

Since you other PC has it, you may have to determine what is different between the two PC's to troubleshoot the problem

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