Todd Stout

This may be part of the problem I asked you guys about last week but I'm not sure.

Last weekend I ran the Windows (XP) Disk Cleanup utility which was interrupted by Diskeeper (which in turn caused the PC to lock up) so I turned the power off and restarted the PC. Since then, Outlook 2002 has been acting VERY strange. When clicking on emails, some messages will open just fine while others cause Outlook to hang for several seconds and then Windows will shut it down. The message box that tells me that Windows is shutting Outlook down has a check box that is checked to restart Outlook so it does come right back up almost immediately (I've never seen the check box before so I thought I'd mention it). This is happening to both old archived emails as well as new ones that are coming in since this started happening.

I have put the Office XP CD back in the computer and done the find and repair (or whatever it's called) twice as well as reinstalling the entire Office suite from the repair part of the CD and neither has fixed the problem. I have also tried running the Office updater from Microsoft's Web site which detects updates that need to be installed but it won't let me actually install them. I get an error message after several minutes stating that the update installation has failed. I am getting the impression that interrupting the Disk Cleanup/Diskeeper processes has left my Office installation corrupted (at least the Outlook part).

Have any of you encountered this sort of thing before? What do I need to do to fix this? I think next I am going to try actually uninstalling Office XP and then reinstalling it fresh again.

Thank you.

Todd Stout

I guess no one has ever experienced this type of problem before. Outlook continues to be shut down by Windows when attempting to open certain emails (from known senders) but for some reason others open just fine.

Yesterday I tried uninstalling Office XP, deleting the Office 10 directory, and then reinstalling Office XP. As soon as I had Office reinstalled, Outlook came up with all email intact which told me that something was left over on the hard drive after uninstalling Office. I was able to apply service packs 1 and 2 for Office XP but the security patches that were available kept failing during the installation process (as they did before my reinstallation).

Can any of you tell me how I may completely uninstall Office XP so that there is no trace of it left on the hard drive before I reinstall it? I really think that whatever is corrupt and cousing my Outlook problems is being left on the hard drive during the uninstall process.

If that isn't the cause, I am thinking that maybe some registry entries are corrupt and I was going to try a repair install of Windows XP next.

This is really starting to drive me nuts and I'm open to any and all suggentions.

Thank you.

Cary_H

I've only encountered something like this on one or two occasions.
I think you've hit the nail on the head around your registry. There might be remnants there from before that makes it think you have the update already. I am guessing it looks elsewhere beforehand to decide you need the update, but then gets confused later on.
Try removing/uninstalling what you can of the app then use a registry cleaner to remove anything related to it that remains in the registry. The cleaner I use will want to remove anything it decides is redundant when it isn't able to find files for an application associated with it.
Once and awhile I've seen update download problems if I don't exit from my pop-up killer and/or firewall.

Todd Stout

Hi Cary,
I tried installing Norton SystemWorks 2004 last night but the install kept getting shut down by Windows (SystemWorks installer has generated an error and will be shut down blah blah blah). I ran the Norton WinDoctor from the CD on the machine and it found 413 errors. It said there were 173 errors in the registry so after skimming over what the problems were, I decided to let WinDoctor fix them. That didn't fix the problem with Outlook but it did cause a new problem. My ArcView 8.3 GIS software quit working (it gave me an error message that some file was missing) so I reinstalled it an now I can't even get the online product authorization to work. I think I am really close to having to reinstall Windows XP fresh... again.

I have been looking into trying a repair install from the Windows XP CD and seeinf if that works and if not, I guess I need to start fresh again. This is really causing me a lot of grief.