Missing Menubar

[Andrew Mathenge]

Outlook 2000 has been working well until today. Whenever I
double-click on a message that was sent as HTML, the
window that displays the message does not have any menu
items or buttons. In addition to that, the area that
displays the message is not sized properly in the window.
It occupies about 25% of the bottom right area of the
window. Once you adjust the main window slightly, the
message area adjusts itself correctly -- the menus still
don't appear.
This behaviour does not happen with messages sent as Plain
Text, or with messages sent as Outlook Rich Text, only
HTML messages.
I have tried adjusting Message Format settings under Tools-

Options->Mail Format to include using Word as the e-mail

editor.
The behaviour is not consistent. In most cases, I can
right-click on the message then select "Reply". Once I do
this, the menu bar and buttons appear and I can reply to
the message.
I have tried using the Office Repair Tool (Control Panel-

Add/Remove programm...) to no effect. This looks like a

corruption problem but I'm not sure if removing Office
entirely and re-installation will fix it. It may point to
an issue with IE???

Any suggestions?

 

[Andrew Mathenge]

I solved this problem myself and I'm just posting this in case someone else
runs into this issue.

I believe this is a problem with a settings file created by Outlook. What I
had to do was delete a file called outcmd.dat. This file is located in
C:\Documents and Settings\<Username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.

Close Outlook first since you can't delete the file if Outlook is running.

Once the file is deleted, re-launch Outlook and menus will be back. Outlook
will recreate the file.

It's also possible that you won't find this file. I've noticed that some of
my users have a file called "extend.dat", not the outcmd.dat file.

Hope this helps out anyone with this problem.