Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window

M$ (automatically) killed my Outlook 2007 last night on my Windows Vista 64 system. It was one of those "Windows Update is finished so we restarted your computer for you even though you didn't say we could" issues, followed by the usual Microsoft screw-up of hosing the system they were supposed to be fixing and protecting.

I'd be a little more patient with them if this wasn't caused directly by following their RECOMMENDED procedures. Yeah, I could disable updates, etc, but that rather defeats the purpose of updates in the first place. No, this is totally on M$. Their recommendations, their update, their software, their restart, their screwup.

They don't get off the hook for me not disabling updates any more than rapists don't get off the hook because their victims don't wear chastity belts. (Well, that might be an extreme analogy, but you get the drift. The bad guy is at fault, period).

But, of course, it's still MY problem.*

The error is simple. Office works fine, but any attempt to launch Outlook results in this error: "Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window".

If you ask Microsoft, their answer is to use the system restore. Don't get me started on their answer being for me to undo their screw-ups. One guy was told to wipe his system!

Anyway, a much better answer by a user called Dayneb in the new (to me) Microsoft Answers forum was something far simpler:

Start->run..then type the following -> Outlook.exe /resetnavpane

In some cases, you have to make sure you are in the Office Directory on your hard drive for this to work, but work it does. Instantly and easily. Thanks Dayneb!

I'd thank MS for the Answers Forum, but that just feels wrong, since I should not have needed the answer in the first place...

Ian

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*Serves me right for not switching to Gmail. I'll do that as soon as I can be anywhere in the world, including airplanes and ships, and still be connected. Hopefully that will come sooner than later. I travel too much now to rely on GMail for anything other than a backup system and spam catcher.

9 comments:

qwerty said...

This is the sort of thing that makes me feel good about having installed Thunderbird.

travel30 said...

Hi Ian

I am searching for you everywhere on Internet from last 2-3 days, I am facing a big problem and that may cost me my Job also. I have seen a post of yours in High ranking forums about Domain parking, my problem is

my website http://www.otssolutions.com ranks very well in India but has worst ranking in USA. I have a .us domain should i use domain parking on my website? if yes then how to do that? is 302 redirection can do what domain parking would do? Pls pls pls pls pls pls pls pls pls reply...

Ian McAnerin said...

Hi Rohit,

I did a quick check on your site and it appears to be geolocated to the USA, which means that parking a .us on it is unlikely to help you.

I do notice that your site has more than 40K inlinks, but is only a PR2, which means that your problems are more likely to be too many low-quality links and not enough high quality ones, from Googles perspective. This is easily fixed with some high quality US based links.

I hope that helps,

Ian

Alex said...

I works with MS Outlook files very often and consequently sometimes have got some problems.Previous week my mail was corrupted and I didn't know what to do.But a friend advised-pst viewer or pst-viewer.And tool fix it.I noticed that tool has got next resource for restore your data from files with *.pst and *.ost extension.

travel30 said...

Ian McAnerin said...@ Thank you so much Ian for the clarification, it has only 400 something links at the last Google Pr update that’s why it only 2Pr, I have started working on it after last Google PR update and started building links for it and now it has more than 40k links, I would like to tell you one thing, I use to work for http://www.nagarro.com earlier and that website was also suffering for the same problem mentioned in my previous comment but all of sudden it takes the U turn and now rank brilliantly in USA also, and when I check it in google.co.in ( and select pages from India) thn nagarro's website do not come in to the search result and OTS website does come in same search results. I am very confused and not able to think what to do and that may take my job from me soon 

Anonymous said...

Hi! I hope you have managed to work out the outlook issue. If not check this out:
Cannot open the Outlook window
Hope it helps!

Anonymous said...

Had same problem, totally unable to fix until I saw your posting. Worked like a charm. Thank You so much

Alex said...

Some days ago I worked with one tool-how do you open an ost file in outlook 2003?.And it solved my problems in seconds and for free.I was surprised,moreover program showed me how it open ost file in Outlook 2003 and recover your data from these encrypted *.ost files.

Jenny Wren said...

Thank you so much for the fix to Outlook!! You just made my day!