Outlook custom toolbar dissapers

[grant]

It looks like there is a known bug with Outlook 2000 where the custom
toolbars randomly dissapear

So is there any workaround to fix this?

No I dont want to upgrade!

thanks in advance

Grant

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

That's a new known bug to me and I've been developing Outlook 2000 COM
addins for 10 years now since during the Outlook 2000 beta.

Is this your software? Is the custom toolbar created by a COM addin? What's
the code that creates the toolbar and destroys it? What type of toolbar,
Inspector or Explorer?

What mode of operation for Outlook 2000 (C/W or IMO)?

 

[grant]

Here is the link to the MS article

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223580/en-us

I see now it only refers to View menu commands disappearing rather
than the whole toolbar.

I'll describe how I have created to toolbar and button to clarify

I open a message
right click on the toolbar and pick Customise
Click New and call it "DocMan"
Then click on the Commands tab, select Macros and drag my macro onto
the custom toolbar

This has been working fine on my pc which is running outlook 2007, but
the other pc is running outlook 2000 ans the toolbar was running ok
for a couple of weeks, then last week it just disappeared. I recreated
the toolbar and button, but it wouldnt save it so when I closed
Outlook and re opend it I had to recreate the toolbar. Then all of a
sudden it started working ok again. Now yesterday it disappered again.

Any suggestions much appreciated


Regards

Grant

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

That article is actually misleading.

There are actually multiple View menus that are context sensitive. So the
View menu in a contacts folder is different from the one in an email or
calendar folder. Some of the View menus are used on a couple of different
types of folders or in multiple contexts. So a button placed on a View menu
in a contacts folder might not be there or it might assume a different
placement in another folder type or different context.

There's almost the same situation with the QAT in Outlook 2007, there are
many different QAT's and if you customize the one for contacts your
customization won't show up in a calendar folder. As I recall there are
something like 17 different QAT's for Outlook, as there are that many
different ribbons.

Toolbars such as Standard or Advanced are also context sensitive in that way
so something you add in say Standard might have different positioning
depending on what the current context is.

In your case it almost sounds like your Outcmd.dat file is corrupted. That
file holds all of your toolbar/menu customizations. In Outlook 2000 it was
more prone to corruption than in later versions of Outlook.

Since this is a programming group I assumed your toolbar/button/whatever was
created in code. It now sounds like you customized using the UI and not
code, so this really isn't a programming issue.

However, I'd first locate and delete or rename your Outcmd.dat file when
Outlook is closed. You will lose all of your customizations but you can
re-create them. See if that helps. The other thing I'd look at is any COM
addins you are running to see if any are customizing menus/toolbars or
creating new ones. That could be the source of the corruption you probably
are seeing. In that case either a newer version of the addin or not using it
might be the solution.