Outlook problem

Every so often when I open Microsoft Outlook 2007, I get that error to come up. It happens like 30% of the time and the other times, nothing happens and everything works smoothly. I'm running Vista Ultimate on a fairly new computer. I think the problem could be caused by one of those tweaks I did to speed up my computer by altering the services that I read about on this site but I don't know. Can anyone help me with this problem? Thank you

 

Check in your event logs to see if there are any logged events that correspond to the problem; that should provide some more details about what's actually going on.

 

Usually I can find and deal with things on computers pretty well but could you tell me where I can find my event logs?

 

Type "Event Viewer" in the start menu.

The logs you're looking for should be under "Applications and Services Logs">"Microsoft Office Sessions"

 

Try this...

1. Close Outlook completely.

2. Browse to the Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12 folder.

3. Locate a file called SCANPST.EXE and run it.

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4. Click on Browse and locate your PST file, then click Start. By default, your PST file should be located in the %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook folder.

5. Let the scan finish, then select repair, and the errors should go away.

 

Sweet! I did this and we will see if my problem persist. Thankkk you oh so very muchh. Btw, I went to check my event logs like you two mentioned and it said everything was working fine. Even during the times where the error messaged appeared.

 

I get this message when Outlook was "prematurely terminated" - i.e. whole computer crashed or the process is killed in the tak manager.
While I had not yet had a problem because of this you never know...

Have you done any tweaks that firce processes to shut down quickly.
Once you close Outlook it still needs some time to process the data file.
Archiving can help here by the way.

Also, does this message appear when you close and reopen Oulookt or when you close Outlook, shut down the computer and then after a restart?

 

The only tweak I can remotely think of that deals with shutting down is the one that shortens my shut down time to about 10 seconds but that shouldn't be a problem cause I usually manually close out of everything before I perform a computer shut down anyway.

You know, I've never really paid attention to when the message pops up but I've definitely seen it come up by just closing and reopening Outlook. I usually check Outlook through out the day and it comes up randomly but i'll be more viligante now.

 

That may be the source of your problem. When you manually close out of a program, the OS gives it time to gracefully close itself down; however, if you've shortened the shutdown time to 10 seconds, that means that when you initiate a shutdown, the OS gives every executing process 10 seconds to go through its shutdown procedures, and if a process is not finished doing so after 10 seconds, it is unceremoniously and ungracefully killed, which can cause errors such as corrupting files that the killed process hadn't finished writing to when it was killed off.

 

For the record, when you see that message pop up, it is actually running the scanpst.exe in the background, this is what it means by is being checked for problems. The main difference is that, one the file is being checked while Outlook is running, and the manual method I showed you, the file is being checked while Outlook is closed. The manual method is safer and more reliable.

 

Wait? So the tweak that shortens the shutdown time actually affects every single program as well? I was under the assumption it only affected the shutting down of the entire laptop (when I go hit the start button and click shutdown). When I do close out of Outlook I don't ever immediately follow it up with a shutdown. I give it ample amounts of time to do whatever it needs to do but I do get what you're telling me and it makes perfect sense.

 

That's why the shutdown time is normally set at such a high value - to permit everything that's functioning normally the time needed to close down gracefully. Shortening that time will cause processes that need a little longer to end up being killed before they can finish what they have to finish.