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Sir Crashalot – Outlook 2007

June 5, 2006 at 12:06 am · Filed under Rants, Software

A not so well known knight of the round table, and in my case a series of annoying dialogue boxes. As I said in my previous update, Outlook 2007 grenades itself on exit, and gives this cheerful error message:

Outlook2007GoBang

The thing that bugs me is that it automatically wants to restart, which I obviously ignore and click Don’t Send. Outlook then reappears, so I go to close it since that’s what I wanted to do in the first place and the error box appears again… and well rinse and repeat several times until I untick Restart Microsoft Office Outlook. Grrrr.

It seems though that Office was watching my incompetence and fired this up last time I went round in circles:

OfficeCrashAlot

Fair enough, it’s nice and polite, so I thought I’ll see what it comes back with. It then fired off a series of tests and I expected it to whinge about my incompatible plugins.

OfficeCrashAlot4

Nope, the problem is Office 2003! Really? It then took me to the Office Online website and came up with this gem:

Compatibility Diagnostic — Conflicting versions of Outlook found

The Compatibility Diagnostic test identified conflicting versions of Microsoft Office Outlook. To remove the version of Outlook from your computer that you do not want, in Control Panel in Microsoft Windows, double-click Add or Remove Programs.

I don’t really want to uninstall 2003 since I don’t know when 2007 Beta 2 expires and if Office 2007 really did have a problem with it, shouldn’t it have removed it before installing itself? Sigh…

Office Diagnostics is a nice idea, but in this case it’s about as much use a chocolate teapot.

Eric Fortier said,

June 7, 2006 @ 12:09 am

When I installed Office 2007 I was told that Outlook 2003 needed to be uninstalled and that it was the only component of Office 2007 that couldn’t co-exist with Office 2003. Maybe the setup didn’t detect your version.

So I very reluctantly removed Outlook 2003 and found that 2007 was nice. It was really slow and was eating a lot of memory due to that damn indexing search thingy (I hate those). Some HTML emails also didn’t look right while others were all messed up, so I decided to go back to 2003.

A word of hope if you’re thinking of going down the same path as I did: everything worked flawlessly for me, and all my emails, accounts and rules came through intact.

I kept Word 2007 installed and I really love it. Everything works nice and I didn’t have a single crash so far.

Paul said,

June 7, 2006 @ 4:03 pm

Eric, thanks for commenting.

That’s odd because I’ve installed it on two machines both with Outlook 2003, latest versions etc, and the installer didn’t mention it as problem. But thanks for pointing it out.

Everything you’ve said there I agree with. The rest of Office, no problems at all, it’s been really stable.

With regards to the indexing thingy, it does seem to be a bit of memory and disk hog and I only installed it since Outlook kept on asking. I already have Yahoo Desktop installed for indexing my emails so I think I’ll look into removing it.

As to whether I’ll switch back to Outlook 2003, I don’t know. I really like the new collapsible panes and I’m starting to use the categories. I think I’ll carry on with it for a bit yet.

I have a question for you. Do you use the Word email editor in Outlook 2003, and if so, given you have Word 2007 installed does it use it or does it revert to Word 2003? Cheers.

Steve Greenberg, Program Manager, Office Trustworthy Computing said,

June 12, 2006 @ 7:43 pm

Hi Paul,

I’m Steve Greenberg, a Program Manager on the team responsible for Office Diagnostics. First of all, thanks so much for beta-testing Office 2007. We get so much value from the feedback we get during beta. On that note, I’m happy you brought this issue to my attention. A couple of points worth mentioning: 1) Office 2007 shouldn’t let you install side by side with Office 2003. But… the code to prevent this from occuring isn’t perfect and obviously didn’t work in your situation. I’m sorry about that. 2) Our diagnostic did correctly identify the fact that Outlook is behaving unacceptably on your machine. So as the PM for the feature, I’m happy about that. And it correctly noted that there are two versions of Outlook on the machine which isn’t a supported configuration. So that’s good too. It fell short in that it may not be the case that the double-install is what’s causing your trouble. That’s too bad. 3) This brings me to my next point. I’d be happy to help try to figure out what’s going on with Outlook. As you suspect, the likely culprit is incompatible add-ins. But it’d be good to check this out. I’ll email you separately to pursue the situation if you’re interested..

Paul said,

June 12, 2006 @ 10:41 pm

Hi Steve,

Thanks for taking the time to post. I’d love to help. I’m just running the Office Diagnostics as requested and will email you shortly.

Pauked.com » Outlook 2007 Crash Update said,

June 19, 2006 @ 9:31 pm

[…] My previous, Sir Crashalot post on Outlook 2007, prompted a comment and email from Steve Greenberg, the Program Manager for the Office Diagnostics tool. He was very interested in sorting out my crash problems and it started a series of email’s between myself and various peeps at Microsoft to help sort it out. […]

Rick Thomas said,

June 29, 2006 @ 5:47 pm

We are having a problem with Outlook 2007 not being able to send messages, sending Vcals seems to b a problem. When the beta installed it did not install 2003. Eric Fortier – when you said “everything worked flawlessly for me, and all my emails, accounts and rules came through intact.” were you refering to going back to 2003? The diagnostic did say there were two versions installed. Will these issues resolve if I uninstall 2003? If not can I reinstall 2003 and keep all the messages, calendar, contacts from 2007?

Nick Zigic said,

August 6, 2006 @ 10:02 am

Hi All,

My issue is that Microsoft’s idea of not allowing two versions to co-exist, works on my computer and is reporting it, however, I got to this situation when my memory card crashed and damaged the Office XP installation, so I couldn’t use the “uninstall” component, but was left to delete folder by folder, obviously skipping the registry and/or service components of the previous installation. Now Outlook 2007 can’t stay open but for a few clicks (reporting the conflicting versions error), but the other applications work well … and I like them. It’s sad, since I use Outlook extensivly, and all the new features seem really atractive. Does anyone know what I should do to get this resolved, since I do not have any “visible” files from the previous version left, and other options are beyond my level of understanding windows? Thanks.

PS I just found out the the new IE does not allow my Google Toolbar to apply spellchecking, so, sorry, lots of spelling mistakes.

Dereck said,

August 30, 2006 @ 9:30 pm

To Nick Zigic

Why don’t you re-install the Windows? It will give a freash start, right?

Dereck

Greg S. said,

December 19, 2006 @ 8:58 pm

I hope someone is still reading this. I have the latest release of office 2007 enterprise. We have sharepoint running with some Infopath 2003 forms. When using Infopath 2007, I try to submit a form and it gives me the ‘some rules were not applied”. It says that outlook 2007 should be my default mail program. I should say that I have a vista machine with 2007 installed and it works fine so this seems to be machine specific. I ran office diagnostics and it says I have 2 versions of outlook installed. I removed 2003 when I frst installed the suite 2 weeks ago. I cannot find any versions of 2003. I do have Visio 2003 but that is not what the diagnostics said the problem was. I have been in the program access and defaults, internet options, etc. Nothing fixes it….I have no hair left. Every search brings back the same things to do and I have done all of them. Please help if you can. -Greg

Paul said,

December 20, 2006 @ 10:10 am

Greg, unfortunately I think the only person that actively reads comments here is myself. I did a quick search and see what you mean, there isn’t much help.

Perhaps removing all Office 2003 products (i.e. Visio) might help? You never know, there could still be some form of DLL active from the 2003 install that affects the 2007 stuff. If it was me, I’d try that.

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