On opening outlook 98 I get message 'the operation failed'

[puppet]

I have a user running Outlook 98 and on opening Outlook he recieves the message 'The Operation Failed' Outlook opens fine however. He is also not getting any reminders. I opened outlook with /cleanreminders (and got no error message) and he recieved all his backdated reminders but on creating a new appointment he recieved no reminder for this. I opened again with /cleanreminders and got the reminder for the test message. On opening with the normal idesktop icon he still got the operation failed error message so I opened with /cleanreminders again and then with /cleanfreebusy and recieved message that one or more reminders is not working. Now no matter how I start Outlook I recieve the 'the operation has failed' error message.

Any ideas anyone?

 

[beckas]

The user has a corrupted recurring calendar appt. The only way to fix the problem is to either upgrade the user to Outlook 2000 or else remove the corrupted recurring appointment from the user's calendar. I've found that the best way to find the corrupted appointment is to create a new test mailbox, login to the test mailbox, add the user's mailbox as a secondary mailbox to the Outlook folder list, sort the user's calendar to the recurring appts view, and then copy the recurring appointments to the test mailbox's calendar one by one. Eventually one of the appointments will give you an error message during copying and that means that it is the corrupted appointment. Delete that appointment from the user's calendar and have them recreate it.

This was a common problem for us with Outlook 98. Luckily the problem has been fixed in Outlook 2000.

See

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;193281

for more information.