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I recently had problems with my Outlook 2007 on my Windows XP Pro system at work.

Basically, the program wouldn’t start up properly.  It would start and then encounter an error and try to restart itself (unless I unchecked the box to tell it not to).

It would then try to start itself in ”Safe Mode” (does that imply that the normal mode is unsafe?), but that would also fail.

I tried uninstalling Outlook and re-installing it, but that made no difference.
I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the entire Office 2007 suite, but again, that made
no difference.
In the end, I found a website that described the same symptoms and proposed a solution. It was the User Profile that was corrupted - not the program itself. By creating a new profile, I was able to get Outlook running again, but it would still throw a few errors, especially after I had imported my folders and messages from my old profile.

Then I found an even easier way - a FREE program that fixes up corrupted Outlook Profiles. After running this on the old profile, Outlook worked perfectly.

OLFix (Freeware) for Outlook 97 to 2007 combines some tools for repairing common things like the profile, contact links and features, for example calling the internal Outlook repair command line switches with a click of a button. Also some hidden settings can be set for example reminders in different folders.

Highlights:

a) Repairs Outlook profiles.
b) Repairs Outlook contact links.
c) Extends reminder folders.
d) Enables Outlook address book in Outlook express and other programs.
e) Searches of dupes in Outlook.

Outlook sometimes has problems with the profiles, if you for example delete a data file while Outlook is running, Outlook sometimes forgets to delete some registry keys. At next start Outlook will try to load the deleted store provider but will fail because some of the keys are deleted and some not. This gives you sometimes double personal folders, double OLfolders, double Exchange folders, slow Outlook start and errors on start up.

Open repair profiles and select the profile you want to repair.

OLFix will display all registry entries for this profile. Some of them are pre-selected; the pre-selected entries usually can be deleted. Most data files require two registry keys, one main key and one detail key. Exchange usually has one more than two keys, the main key for Exchange and detail keys for your email accounts, shared folders, personal folders, delegates etc.

If you find PST files, OLfolders files etc. with only one key or with more than two keys, they usually are damaged. In Outlook, elements can contain links to contacts; Outlook stores the entry ID of the contact. If you export the file into a new one, the links will still point to the old file, if that is not present, the contact link no longer works. There may be other opportunities to damage contact links. Outlook also stores some other information about the contact, which allows us to find the contact and repair the link.

Editorship valuation of “WinTotal - The Windows Portal”: Outstanding!

So if you have the same problem of Outlook not starting up, check out Olfix.
It might just save you a lot of time and frustration.

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