Outlook 2000 "Operation Failed"

[mradmin]

Hi Office experts,

I have a user with Office 2000 pro (SP-3 and all patches applied) on a WinXP home system that has been working fine for months. Yesterday morning, he clicked on the Outlook icon, it opened the window and immediately displayed a dialog box "Operation Failed" (with no further explanation) and an 'ok' button. Clicking that closes Outlook. This PC also has Symantec Anti-virus Corp. 8.1 and Norton Anti-Spam. All of the other office apps work fine, Even tho system restore is enabled, there are no restore points before yesterday AM. We have no exchange server running. I've un-installed the Symantec apps, tried a repair, tried a re-install, uninstalled and reinstalled the Office package. The outlook.pst folder is about 105Mb and scanpst.exe finds no errors. Any suggestions?

 

[mradmin]

just for the curious, this problem was solved by re-installing Windows (!). I had tried to find the exact cause of the problem, which I guess was in the registry, but the lesson learned: it's not worth the time, compared to wipe-it-out and start over... I'll remember this for next time.

 

[KenWright]

One option might have been to try deleting the outlook.cmd file, which can cause similar havoc to the normal.dot file in Word and the *.xlb file in Excel. The apps will simply create new files, though you may lose some customisatiosn stored in the previous ones.

Regards
Ken...............

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[YellowOnline]

I had a phonecall from a client yesterday worth the same problem... it was somehow related to the MSOXP license.

Peace,

Yellow