Problem Starting Outlook Express

[MikeB]

Hello...

I am having trouble staring Outlook Express. Here's what happened:

I opened it like I always do from the Quicklaunch toolbar, and when it opened, I clicked on the Inbox. When I clicked on it, the I heard the "new mail" sound, but then the system froze.

I rebooted, and tried starting OE again. When I did, this happened-
I got a dialog box that said:
"Outlook express is going to migrate your store from beta 2 format. This will remove the messages.ods file."

When I click okay, I get and Illegal Operation error.

I tried uninstalling Oe and reinstalling it, but no change.

Please help!

[Spider]

Originally posted by MikeB:
<STRONG>I got a dialog box that said:
"Outlook express is going to migrate your store from beta 2 format.
This will remove the messages.ods file."
When I click okay, I get and Illegal Operation error.
I tried uninstalling Oe and reinstalling it, but no change.</STRONG>

Hi MikeB, welcome to CyberTechHelp.

It sounds like there were either some changes made to Outlook's
configuration or perhaps some third party(fancy name for it doesn't belong
to Microsoft) program is attached to files that Outlook owns/uses.

If you recently installed anything that utilizes email or proxys I suggest you remove it.

You are going to have to reinstall Windows. With a Windows install
you will over-write Outlook. Ideally the best way to reinstall Windows
is to make a boot floppy, bootup off of it and then insert Windows CD
and run setup.exe.
You'll have to update IE to 5.5 SP2 after but it's the only way to get
Outlook Express to stop behaving like it is.

[MikeB]

Well, I didn't re-install windows...but I did get it working.

I went into explorer and just deleted everything in the "WINDOWS\Application Data\Identities\{FF787D20-F5E5-11D5-986E-8F1D0157CC79}\Microsoft\Outlook Express" folder. It starts fine now, so I guess thats good enough.

I do have a different problem though, for some reason, my Quicklaunch toolbar stopped working. My system was running slow and nothing was working quite right, so I rebooted. When windows came back up, The Quicklaunch tool bar wasn't there. So, I right clicked to select Quicklaunch. When I did this, I got an error message "cannot create toolbar". The contents of the folder where the shortcuts for my quicklaunch toolbar are kept is still intact, so I created a new toolbar, named it quicklaunch, and pointed it to the old quicklaunch folder.

So, really I guess I don't have a problem, but I would like to know why it's doing this. When I right-click and select toolbars, there are now 2 selections names Quicklaunch, but only the new one works.

Thanks

[Spider]

Originally posted by MikeB:
<STRONG>I didn't re-install windows...
I...just deleted everything in ...folder...I guess thats good enough.
I do have a different problem though...Quicklaunch toolbar stopped
working. My system was running slow and nothing was working
quite right...I got an error message "cannot create toolbar"...So,
really I guess I don't have a problem</STRONG>

Deleting the Outlook identities contents will not cure what is ailing
your computer (from what you described in your first post).
Perhaps I should have gone into more detail for your fix but I hope
you can appreciate that sometimes there just isn't enough time
to give each and every post a full breakdown as to why a problem
exists as well as offer some possible solutions. I have found that
most users simply need the cure and are not really concerned about
the science involved with what created the problem and what fixes it
and why.

It's good to be analytical and want to know why as well as how.

Your Windows operating system is corrupted. It happens and
there is nothing anyone can do about it. Part of owning and
running computers that run Microsoft operating systems is
having a boot disk, an operating system CD complete with Product
Key, a good knowledge of basic hard drive manipulations, and
a few good third party maintenance programs.

Basically you have corrupt files within Windows. Some of
these corrupt files are dynamic link libraries which are
pretty important. Not only Windows, but many programs
and applications use these libraries to function as well.

These days one doesn't search and replace corruption. The
fix is always reinstall for it replaces all files therefore eliminating
the corrupted files.