Stuck in a loop.

[Ian Sweeney]

1) Outlook crashes on startup
2) Sends error report to Microsoft
3) Restarts
4) Goto 1

How do I rescue my system? I've tried the restart
in 'Safe Mode' and also allowed 'Detect & Repair' to run,
but to no avail.

XP Home SP2 running Outlook 2002 SP3

 

[DL]

I assume by safe mode you mean you ran OL in safe mode, and not Win.
If you download and install this
http://www.dependencywalker.com/
then start and run OL through it, you may get a clue as to what is causing
the problem.

 

[DL]

A 2nd thought; locate the file outcmd.dat, in the Outlook folder, rename and
see if that helps

 

[silverdye]

Great tips - either I had great luck all of a sudden, or renaming outcmd.dat worked for me. I've been having this problem for a few days, too, except my cyle was:

1) Outlook crashes
2) Outlook failed to restart. Start in safe mode?
3) Outlook failed to restart in safe mode. Detect and repair?
4) Detect and repair completed successfully. Outlook crashes.

Dunno, maybe if you leave it loading for a while, it'll get there eventually, then it might be fine after that. Guess I'm not patient, but something worked for me. Also, might be you don't AutoArchive or you have very large PST files?

Dependency Walker is pretty cool, by the way...