I have seen many an Outlook crash in the desktop support role. Often times, if you go into the Windows Event Viewer and look in the Application logs you will see a corresponding error for Microsoft Office. If you look at the details, you might see that it will point to outllib.dll as the faulting module: 
Often times, this error is being caused by outcmd.dat, the file that stores your toolbar custom settings in Outlook. To see if this resolves the problem with Outlook crashing, close Outlook and go to C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook and delete this file. Since the crashes can be random, monitor for the problem before assuming it has been corrected. A telltale sign that this file is causing the problem is to check its size. A normal outcmd.dat is between 10-20 kb and anything larger than 100kb should be suspect.
Posts Tagged ‘Outlook’
Outlook Crashes & Outllib.dll
Posted by William Diaz on March 2, 2011
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Outlook | Leave a Comment »
Outlook .dat Files
Posted by William Diaz on February 4, 2011
Knowing what the Outlook 2003 .dat file do can often assist’s you with troubleshooting Outlook issues. The primary .dat files are: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Office | Tagged: Outlook | Leave a Comment »
The Case of the Outlook Send Email Hangs
Posted by William Diaz on February 3, 2011
Process Explorer can often times give you clues to hung processes. Simply open the hung process and go to the Threads tab. Take this case here where Outlook was hanging and showing significant CPU usage while trying to send an email. I started by identifying the hung thread. In this case, CPU time and CSwitch Delta columns make this obvious. Select the thread and double-click it or click the Stack button to see the state of the stack. The stack reads from bottom to top. Look at the most recent frames for clues to the problem. In this case, mshtml.dll stands out:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Hang, Outlook, Process Explorer | 2 Comments »
A Faulting Module Is Not A Broken Module
Posted by William Diaz on January 14, 2011
It is not usually the case that a “faulting” module is the actual cause of an application error, crash, or hang. Take this example where Outlook was crashing each time after the user opened Outlook: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Crash, Outlook | Leave a Comment »
Outlook, HTML Messages, and Internet Explorer
Posted by William Diaz on December 28, 2010
If you didn’t already know, Outlook 2003 and earlier use IE as its print engine when printing html formatted messages. This means you sometimes need to go to IE to correct problems with emails printing outside of the print margins. These settings are found under File > Page Setup. The defaults are 0.75 on all sides. When coming across issues like this, I often find the margins set to 0.25.
This behavior is not the same for all html formatted messages. Some emails have web content embedded or pasted into them and will have odd page characteristics that cause the message to print outside the margins and may be difficult to correct. Different versions of IE also handle html messages differently.
In Office 2007/2010, html messages in Outlook no longer rely on IE and now use a MS Office html as the printing engine.
Posted in Inside Windows, Troubleshooting | Tagged: Internet Explorer, Outlook, Printing | Leave a Comment »
Why is my Outlook Message Full of ATTXXXXX.htm, .txt, and .dat Attachments?
Posted by William Diaz on December 16, 2010
Every now and then you might encounter a message that contains ATTXXXXX.htm attachment(s): 
If you try to open these, by default they will launch in IE but not open anything or may not display anything meaningful. The reason for this is that the attachment is just a fragment of formatting code from the message body, i.e. html tags. You can see this by right-clicking in the page and selecting View Source:
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Outlook | 3 Comments »
The Email That Refused to Print
Posted by William Diaz on September 17, 2010
From time to time we encounter requests where someone tries to print an email and encounters the following message prompt: “Items in this are still loading. Please wait a moment and try again.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Outlook, Printing | 1 Comment »
The Case of the Sluggish Email Message (Outlook HTML Gone Crazy)
Posted by William Diaz on August 5, 2010
Upon trying to move an email into our document management system in Outlook, the user reported the following error: “The item could not be deleted, it was either moved or already deleted, or access was denied.” This was odd, because normally this error is seen when items are deleted from shared mailboxes, as this this Microsoft KB article explains. The folder she was trying to move it into was her own document store, which she had full access. Upon trying to move other items, the error was not encountered.
I asked the user to send me the message and at first glance there was nothing special about the email. It was composed of a few short paragraphs with no special formatting beside some text bolding. The user composed these messages on a weekly basis, sent them to herself and then would re-file them into the DMS.
I asked the user to open the message on her system, noticed it was very slow to open, and eventually caused Outlook to become unresponsive. After restarting Outlook and looking at the message in the message pane of the user I noticed it was 1MB in size. This was odd because there was no attachment.
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Posted in Office, Troubleshooting | Tagged: Hang, Outlook, Performance | 1 Comment »
User Request – Create Custom Non-Tiling Email Stationary for Outlook
Posted by William Diaz on August 4, 2010
A somewhat odd request: the user needed to create a custom email background from an existing image. This is usually done by going into Tools > Options > Mail Format > Stationary Picker > New > Start with blank stationary and from here select Picture and browse to the image to be used as the background stationary (Outlook 2003). This creates an htm file in the C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Stationery folder.
The only problem with this is that the image will be tiled. And with smaller images there can be lots of tiling the larger the message is. To work around this, you can make the image larger but, in this case, the image was not high qaulity enough to scale it larger without introducing pixelization into the background image. So the request was to insert the image as background but not tile it.
So, to work around tiling, I edited the htm file created with notepad to introduce the following text into the <BODY> tag: style=”background-repeat:no-repeat“.
This is an example of an htm file created as stationary. The body tag is highlighted; the red text indicates the new tag to be inserted:
| <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”> <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Untitled Stationery</TITLE> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content=”text/html; charset=windows-1252″> <META content=”MSHTML 6.00.6000.17063″ name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY style=”FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff” bgColor=#ffffff background=”C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Winnt\stock-photo-girl-runs-on-sand-5199790.jpg” style=”background-repeat:no-repeat”><FONT face=Arial color=#000000 size=2> <DIV> </DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML> |
You can further modify to, for example, center the image in background by adding “background-position:top center”. In fact, you exempt all the mshtml-Outlook junk and do it from scratch:
| <HTML> <head> </head> </head> <BODY background=”C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Winnt\stock-photo-girl-runs-on-sand-5199790.jpg” style=”background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:top center”> </BODY> </HTML> |
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Outlook | Leave a Comment »
User Request – Count Outlook Attachments in Outlook
Posted by William Diaz on August 3, 2010
Here is an odd user request presented to one of our techs. The user wanted to be able to count the number of attachments in an email, especially those with many attachments. You can do all kinds of stuff using Visual Basic in MS Office and a quick Internet search revealed some simple VB code that would create macro in Outlook to count attachments
To do this, open the Visual Basic Editor from Tools > Macro > Visual Basic Editor. Right-click the Modules folder and insert a new module and copy and paste the following text into the editor window:
| Sub CountAttachmentsMulti()
Set mySelect = Outlook.ActiveExplorer.Selection End Sub |
Add the macro to the Outlook standard toolbar or create a new one. Do the same for open messages. Now you can select a message, a range of messages, or open a message and run the macro and get a neat dialog box:
Posted in Office | Tagged: Outlook | Leave a Comment »
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