Outlook (office 2000 on XP) problems

Phirefly

A while back, my sent items started not opening, I just get an error message saying

"unable to display the folder. Errors have been detected in the file XXXXX'

XXX being a file extension which doesn't exist on my computer.

All my sent items since this happened, now appear in my outbox, but emails are still sending fine. Its really annoying but I've just been living with this.

Today, outlook keeps hanging and when I try and attach files to emails, it completely crashes.

Do I need to reinstall outlook and if so, how to I save my emails and reinstate them once the programme is reinstalled?

Many thanks

fwor

It's a long while since I last used it now, but I recall that Outlook 2000 had some really annoying bugs that would corrupt your .PST file in a number of different ways. IIRC, one occurs when the .PST file exceeds a certain size.

In Outlook 2003, MS "fixed" it - not by removing all the bugs, but by adding a "mailbox repair" option in the Tools menu option IIRC.

I ~think~ MS published a separate tool to fix problems, but a quick Google didn't find it, so they may have removed that. You might want to have a look at some of the third-party tools here:

http://www.download3000.com/outlook-2000-pst-repair-downloads.html

Or you might want to move to an alternative mail client such as Mozilla's Thunderbird which (again IIRC) has a tool to import the contents of your existing Outlook .PST file.

fwor

loaner wrote: »

find scanpst.exe on your c: drive, and run it on your .pst outlook data file.

You may find that the existence of scanpst.exe depends on how Office was installed. If you can't find it, follow the guidance here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197316