Fix Microsoft Outlook has encountered a problem error

One of Microsoft’s favorite error messages is “Program X has encountered a problem and needs to close”. You’ll get this message from pretty much any Microsoft product, including Microsoft Office, Windows, and Internet Explorer. Previously I wrote about a way to fix Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close error.

fix this same error for Microsoft Outlook! It may look something like this:

AppName: outlook.exe      AppVer: 11.0.8010.0     AppStamp:232039e
ModName: msmapi32.dll      ModVer: 11.0.8002.0      ModStamp:32949d2
Microsoft outlook has encountered a problem.

These errors, unfortunately, are not easily fixed because there are multiple problems that can give the same error message! So you may see this error in Outlook only when you close the program or you may see it every time you try to check for new mail.
Each of these has be be resolved in a different way! So in this post, I will list out all the possible ways that I know of that you can fix this annoying “Outlook has encountered a problem” error and hopefully one of them works for you.


Method 1 – Install Windows and Office updates
I’m going to start off with the easier tips before going into more technical solutions. Go ahead and install all the latest Windows updates and the latest Office updates. If you have Outlook with Business Contact Manager, make sure to install the service packs for that also. This probably won’t solve your issue, but it’s worth a shot.
Method 2 – Delete and recreate email account
Sometimes this error may be related to the actual email account setup in Outlook. You can try to delete the email account by going to Tools and then Email Accounts or Account Settings.


Click on the email account and then choose Remove or Delete.



Go ahead and recreate the email account and see if that resolves your issue.
Method 3 – Start Outlook without add-ons
Your problem may also be caused if you recently installed an Outlook add-on, so try to remember if you installed anything recently that would have installed an add-in to Outlook. For example, if you install Adobe Professional, it tries to install a PDF add-on to all Office programs.

If you install some kind of Outlook connector add-on, uninstall that and see if the problem goes away. Installing an anti-virus program such as AVG, etc may also install an add-on to Outlook. Other add-ons like spam filters (Cloudmark, etc) may also be causing the issue.

You can quickly tell if an add-on is causing the problem by starting Outlook without any add-ons. Basically, you are starting Outlook in Safe Mode.
Go to Start, then Run, and type in the following command in the Open box:
outlook /safe

If your problem goes away, then you know it’s one of the add-ons. In Outlook 2007, you can enable or disable add-ins by going to Tools, Trust Center and then clicking on Add-ins.



In Outlook 2003, you can disable add-ins by going to Tools, Options, clicking on the Other tab, clicking on Advanced Options, and then clicking on Add-In Manager.
Method 4 – Uninstall any new software
You can also get this error in Outlook by installing some other third party software on your computer. For example, if you recently installed a new toolbar for IE, uninstall it. If you recently updated to a new version of IE, try to revert back to an older version. Sometimes other programs not related to Outlook can cause this error to appear!
Method 5 – Find the corrupt email and delete it
This may sound weird, but one particular email can actually crash the entire Outlook program! Oddly, I have seen this happen before. When you try to read one specific email in your Inbox, all of a sudden Outlook will crash and close without a notice.
You will have to go through your email and try to find the email or emails that cause Outlook to crash. Though this is very rare, it has happened and can be very frustrating to figure out. My suggestion would be to simply click on the first email and just arrow down through emails slowly until you reach the corrupt one.
Method 6 – Replace msmapi32.dll with an older version
Some people have sworn that by replacing this file with a different version, their problem has gone away. However, this is a bit more complicated as their are many versions of this file around and you have to figure out which one will actually work. It’s best to simply copy the one you have currently to a different location and then try out various versions of this file.
You’ll have to do a search on Google for msmapi32.dll to actually find and download the files, but this may work for some people.
Method 7 – Delete or rename auto-complete data file
You can also try to delete the auto-complete history file as that sometimes gets corrupt and can cause this error. First, make sure you can see hidden files and folders by going to Windows Explorer and clicking on Tools, Options, clicking on the View tab and choosing Show Hidden Files and Folders.
Now navigate to the following directory:
C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
Now find the file with a .NK2 extension and either rename the extension to something else or simply delete the file. Outlook will automatically recreate it and hopefully the new version will be error free.
And that’s about it! If your problem still persists, you can always try to completely uninstall Outlook and reinstall it and see if that works. Other than that though, one of the above methods should fix your Outlook error!

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Microsoft Office 2010 Language DLL error

Problem-When I receive excel docs via outlook 2010 I receive the following error when
trying to open it up from an email. But once I hit Ok, it opens up the
excel 2010 sheet.
..
The language DLL 'VBE7INTL.DLL' could not be found.


Solution-

If you find errors related to. Dll files that are preventing entering Windows, start your computer in safe mode to solve the problem. First try to restore your computer to an earlier date (if you have Windows XP or Vista). This form of solution is a quick and easy recommendation that solves many of the problems that may have Microsoft Windows.

Use SFC command from Windows XP to scan and repair Windows files. To run this command, follow these steps.
Click on start > run
In the run box type - sfc / scannow and press Enter.

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Windows 7 64bit, Outlook 2010 64bit, Macbook Pro 64bit

I am a 64bit freak. I got Windows 7, Outlook 2010, Conferencing Addin all 64 bit versions to work on a Macbook pro. Those who are thinking about moving to 64bit and hesitating whether something will break, GO AHEAD! Macbook Pro hardware and Microsoft’s software are the best combination out there. You will enjoy every moment you spend with your laptop. Moreover, I have tried these combinations on HP tablet PC, Sony VAIO, Dell Inspiron and Dell Vostro. HP works best. Others are struggling with driver issues.

I will give you positive and negative feedback with the apps I have tried so far:

Outlook 2010 64 Bit:-





Here are my negative feedback. Outlook Product Manager, please read this. I am a hardcore Outlook customer of you.

All my Outlook COM addins are dead. Outlook 2010 64bit does not support them. Looks like not so good backward compatibility.

Not so significant improvement with Exchange 2007. The startup time has improved from about 5 secs to 2 secs. But the startup time saving is not really a big saver since I start outlook and it keeps running for days until my PC is so screwed that I need a restart.

Office Communicator 2005 does not work.
The beta Office 2010 applications are CPU hungry. I see 30% to 40% CPU most of the time.
It took me over 30 hours until Outlook 2010 started to perform well. All this time, it was indexing and indexing and indexing and burning CPU.
There’s nothing so ground breaking and productivity enhancing in Outlook 2010 yet. After upgrading and using it for couple of days, I don’t see something so attractive that justifies the time spent in upgrading for busy professional. It’s not upgrade at this stage so far. You have to uninstall all Office 2007 or earlier products, addins etc and then install Outlook 2010.
Outlook Keyboard shortcuts are changed, having hard time adjusting. My precious Alt+L for Reply to All is gone. Now it’s Ctrl+Shift+R. Come on guys, when do you just Reply and not to Reply to All? I barely remember ever using Reply only. It’s always Reply to All. Can’t you make a easier shortcut for this?
Keyboard focus gets lost to some weird place sometimes and my navigation using cursor gets broken. I have to click using mouse to get into track.
Quick Tasks are kind of limited. For ex, “Reply & Delete”, who would want to press CTRL+SHIFT+1 to do reply and delete? It’s more natural to press Ctrl+R to reply and then send it and hit DEL. The choices on Quick Tasks are limited as well. I was hoping I would be able to chain multiple commands like – open a new message window, select a specific account to send mail using, select a specific signature and after the mail is sent, show move dialog box to move the conversation to a specific folder. Nope, it does not work this way. First of all there are limited commands which does not even support this. Secondly, all the actions are performed instantly one after another without waiting for the first action to complete.
Quick Steps cannot be added to Quick Access Toolbar. Go figure!




Now the good things:

Overall Outlook experience is smooth. Opening new mail, typing address, doing search, moving messages, viewing a folder on conversation view mode are all significantly faster, even with Exchange. It’s hard to say if it’s due to fully 64 bit environment or due to the fact that none of my COM addins are working.
Outlook exits. Finally! None of the previous Outlook would terminate the process if I exited Outlook. It remains in memory forever unless I kill it from task manager. Now the Outlook really closes, or at least kills itself when I exit. Whenever I exit Outlook and start again, I see it doing some Data Integrity check. This means it is not really closing itself properly, but killing itself. I assume that’s bad and my data in Outlook are slowly getting messed up.
The conversation view is great!
Inline appointment viewer is a life saver. When I get an appointment invite, the email preview shows a small view of the calendar around the meeting time. I can see if I am occupied or if there’s an available time before or after the meeting. This saves me a lot of time everyday as rescheduling meeting is a tedious job in my company and it takes around 4 to 7 reschedules attempts to get a suitable time slot in everyone’s diary for every darn meeting.
Quick Steps is more or less useful. I am getting used to using CTRL+SHIFT+1 to “reply to all and delete” and CTRL+SHIFT+2 for “reply to all and move to folder”. You just have to configure the quick steps to make it suit you. Previously I used to use QuickFile addin, which was a super useful tool, worth paying 39.95.

Onenote 2010 64 Bit:-

The UI is certainly much slicker. It really looks and feels like a notebook now. Sketching performance is improved.

However, a big bug. I was sketching and suddenly my pointer switched to selection mode from pen. All pen options are disabled. I tried exiting and coming back. Nope. Can’t go back to pen mode at all. I am using a Genius Tablet. Looks like Onenote is Tablet PC friendly only. Hope Apple makes a Tablet Macbook Pro soon.
Ms Word 2010 64 Bit:-
Haven’t used it much. Ribbons are as confusing as before. The File menu is even more confusing now. No new shape styles that makes word documents stand out from the rest. No new Smart Art worth mentioning. Overall – disappointing.

The print features are much improved!

Powerpoint 2010 64 Bit:-

I did not notice any significant new feature in Powerpoint, sadly. The ribbon has been made more useful than before. There’s a “Transition” and “Animations” ribbon bar which is very useful to use and saves time putting animations in slides. But that’s all I could see from my limited trial. This is disappointing. I was expecting there would be richer collection of shapes which are really cool to look and makes presentations look like Web 2.0 sites, a lot of new Smart Arts, but nothing.



 Visio 2010 64 Bit:-

The UML Diagram designer is as crappy as ever. Come on Microsoft, watch the other UML designers and learn from them. Currently Visio is my last choice for UML design and makes my job life unhappy because my company forces me to use it. I use PlantUML wherever I can.

I don’t see any new amazingly cool diagram either. I was hoping the Detailed Network Diagram stencil would be much improved with smooth round glossy servers, amazingly cool looking router icons etc. But no luck. The new ribbon interface is as confusing as other Office applications.

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Office 365 Installation breaks Outlook 2010

Question-
After setting up Office 365 SMB/Prof. on my laptop with Office 2010 already installed and Outlook functioning correctly with a Gmail IMAP account, the software has rendered my laptop slow and almost completely useless with Outlook Running.

 If I remove the Outlook account to the on microsoft.com exchange server I regain functionality.

 The main problem is that the Outlook client will stop responding if the gmail IMAP account and the Exchange account are both connected/installed at this same time.

Answers-



First, please run Office 365 Desktop Setup:

1. Log on Office 365. In the right pane, under Resources, click Downloads.

2. Under Set up and configure your Office desktop apps, click Set up. The Microsoft Office 365 desktop setup tool starts.

3. After setup, test the Outlook issue again.

If the issue persists, you may refer to the following KB article to troubleshoot this issue.

Outlook performance is slow in the Office 365 environment

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2441551

Thanks,

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Export Outlook 2010 To Lotus Notes And Get Better Database Security

Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes both are popular email clients therefore, switching between these two email clients is also common and users can easily Export Outlook 2010 to Lotus Notes (http://www.psttonsf.org/) with Outlook to Notes converter.

IBM Lotus Notes:

IBM Lotus Notes is the leading collaboration and enterprise email client for personal and organizational efficiency and its platform ultimately fits for the execution of Work-flow applications. It is very customizable so each application can be customized in less time in this. It provides the facility to inherit values of document. Example: One reply to a posting in newsgroup can acquire the values from the original document by which you can see the information like; who posted the original document, when the original document got posted, subject of the post etc. You get rich text documentation in Lotus Notes i.e. Lotus Notes emails can have graphics, sound files and video along with regular text. You can use SysTools Outlook to Notes Converter (http://www.convertpsttonsf.com/bundle-offers.html) with which you can get high level of security in Lotus Notes like:


1). The databases can have several levels of security for users or groups, some parts of the database (form) can be encrypted and only those who have the key can see it, multiple fields of that form (database) can also be encrypted with different keys.

2). Database can have digital signatures by which the recipients of that document can check the person who signed that document and whether the content of document has been altered or not.

3). Important emails can be prevented from being forward by the recipient to others.

4). User’s password cannot be changed by the administrator.

5). User cannot obtain a copy of database because full encryption of database can be done with physical access to Server.

 Web Publishing:

Most of the benefits of Lotus Notes are available from WEB as the databases of Notes automatically get converted to HTML and by this, the users can browse and edit information in the databases on WEB.

While on the other hand, Outlook doesn’t provide such high level of security, application customization, web publishing, document sharing etc. So, if you are an Outlook user and you want to Export Outlook 2010 to Lotus Notes (http://www.psttonsf.co.uk/) due to some purpose or to avail the benefits of Lotus Notes then, you can use Outlook to Notes converter. This software can export the entire database from Outlook to Lotus Notes i.e. you can get all your items like emails, contacts, calendar, journals and to-do list in Lotus Notes from Microsoft Outlook.

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Managing Outlook 2010 Multiple Email Accounts

Microsoft Outlook 2010 can manage all your email accounts. This gives you a single interface for working with all your messages. There are two aspects to making this happen. The first is knowing how to configure Outlook for Gmail or whichever service you are using. Unfortunately, I don't have enough space here to cover how that works. The link at the end of this article will take you to a site that does have all the information.

The second aspect is knowing how to work with the different accounts once you have them set up. This article covers those basics.

When you Receive Messages

You can receive messages from various different types of accounts. Outlook 2010 automatically checks each email account for you, based on the settings in your Send/Receive groups. Messages end up in different spots depending on the type of account. Typically, messages from Gmail and Hotmail accounts will end up in their own mail folders, while messages from other types of accounts end up in the Inbox.

So how do you know which messages are associated with which accounts? The messages that end up in their own set of folders are easy. For other types of accounts, if you can't tell just by looking, you can look at the To: field of the message. The email address the sender addressed it to appears on that line.

When You Send Messages

When sending messages, you control which account Outlook 2010 uses. Outlook always has a default account for sending messages, but you can tell Outlook to use a different account like this:

When you create a new message, Outlook 2010 assumes that you want to send the message from the email account you are working in right now. This is a change from earlier versions, which assumed you wanted to send from the default account.

When you're replying to a message you received, Outlook uses the same account as the message by default. But you can always tell Outlook to send the reply using a different account.
When you forward a message, Outlook handles it the same way as a reply.
So how exactly do you tell Outlook 2010 to use a different account? You do it when you are working in the message window. Look for the "From" button next to the "Send" button (this only appears if you have more than one account set up). Click From and select the account you want to use.

Set the Default Account

If you want to change Outlook's default account, here's what you have to do:

In the Ribbon, click the File tab.
In the menu that appears, click Info to display the "Account Information" screen.
Click the Account Settings button and select Account Settings... in the menu that appears. This opens the "Account Settings" dialog box to the "E-mail" tabbed page.
In the box that contains the list of email accounts, select the account you want to use as the default account (the current default account has a checkmark in a blue circle next to it).
If the account you selected is not already the default account, the "Set as Default" option (located above the box containing the email accounts) should now be clickable. Click Set as Default to change the default account.
Click Close to return to the Outlook window.
You now have the basic information you need to work with multiple email accounts in Outlook 2010. All you need now is solid instructions for connecting accounts to Outlook.

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McAfee Hawkex add-in causes MS Outlook to crash

There are various application or add-ins that are incompatible with various versions of MS Outlook. Due to this incompatibility, at times MS Outlook may crash, which invariably leads to corruption of the PST (Personal Storage Table) file. In such situation, you should use certain workarounds to remove the add-in or uninstall the application. If that does not solve your purpose, then you should use a third-party Oultook PST repair software to repair Outlook PST file.

Let us consider a practical scenario in which you try to create an email in MS Outlook 2003. However, it fails to do so and exits abruptly. An error message is displayed in this regard, which is:

"Microsoft Outlook has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

To see what data this error report contains, click here."

In addition, when you see the signature of the error message the following report is displayed:

"App Name     App Version    Module Name   Module Version      Offset

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Outlook.exe  10.0.xxxx.x    Hawkex.dll    version             0000ebbc"

Cause:

The most possible cause of this erroneous situation is that you have installed the Network Associates McAfee Hawkex add-in your system, which is incompatible with MS Outlook 2003.

Also, it is quite possible that because of regular crashing of Outlook 2003, its PST file may have damaged.

Resolution:

To resolve this problem, you should contact Network Associates to check whether there is any hotfix to fix this problem. In the meantime, you should remove the McAfee Hawkex add-in by performing the following steps:

Click Start | Run.
In the 'Open' box, type 'Outlook.exe/safe' and press the 'Enter' key to run Outlook in safe mode.
Click Tools | Options.
Click 'Advanced Options' in the 'Other' tab.
Click 'Add-in Manager' in the 'Advanced Options' dialog box.
Clear the check box for McAfee Hawkex add-in.
Click OK.
Close all the dialog boxes by clicking the OK button.
Restart Outlook 2003.
If the problem is appearing again, it means that the PST file has corrupted for which you should use the Inbox Repair (scanpst.exe) tool to scan and repair the PST file for any errors. If the problem still persists, then you should use a third-party PST file repair software to perform PST recovery. The benefits of using such PST repair tools is that the PST file is not modified while repairing it using safe scanning algorithms.

The best Outlook repair software in the market is Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair that repairs PST files created for MS Outlook 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002, and 2000. Compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and 2000, this Outlook PST repair utility is capable of repairing contacts, emails (with attachments), calendar items, notes, tasks, journals, etc.

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