MS Outlook Problems

[Mojo_Joe]

MS Outlook is wreaking havoc on my PC. I had never used it before using Eudora for POP mail and Hotmail for webmail, however...

I got a PDA and it comes with Outlook 2002 so I installed it. Sometime thereafter, I believe that I re-installed MS Office 2000 on my PC and somehow installed Outlook 2000 over the previous installed Outllok 2002.

I had all sorts of odd errors and outlook gave me error messages when I tried to receive mail. Oddly, it would not uninstall either. After reading a number of knowledge base articles and eventually downloading some sort of an MS Office installation "cleanup" utility, I managed to get Outlook running again...

The problem is that whenever I run outlook (or Internet Explorer) I get a Windows installer prompt to put the Outlook 2002 disk in. After cancelling this prompt two or three times it finally goes away and I can use Outlook or IE, but it is a little annoying.

Additionally, the Windows automatic update utility is no longer functional. I can get updates manually from the MS web site, but I can no longer turn on auto updates.

Any ideas what the hell is going on with my machine?

Thanks All

[Dave420]

pm me or try to catch me on msn -I think I have a fix for you.

[Shan]

Could you guys please keep us up to date on what the problem is/was?

I'm dying of curiousity here.

Have a few ideas of my own but not really experienced enough to post advice since I am not at all sure if I'd actually be helping or not.

:)

[Mojo_Joe]

I think I fixed the problems I was seeing by installing Office XP (I was using Office 2000) and by manually deleting and then recreating my mail profiles. As best I can tell from reading some of the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles out there, the problem has something to with the Microsoft Office installer program.

Apparently installing an older version of Outlook on top of a newer version creates this problem (and a couple of other problems) and there does not appear to be a real easy way to "undo" the mess as the Windows installer will not allow a reinstall of Outlook 2002 or an uninstall of Outlook 2000.

After a little bit of research on the net I figured out that a lot of people went through the same issues I did and many wound up either reformatting the drive or deleting a lot of registry keys and "hoping for the best."

For what its worth, installing one of the new versions of Office seems to fix the problem also. Man, that Gates guy sure thinks of everything when figuring out how he can get people to buy a yearly upgrade for MS Office... Very clever.

[Dave420]

yeah installing office 2003 would have done it because it rebuilds the install.now that is an expensive fix ;)

[Shan]

hmm...I wasnt to far off the mark then..figured it had something to do with installing the older version over the new.

Had no idea how to fix it, outside of formatting (which is what I would have done) but glad you managed to fix it. :)