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General discussion

Failed Outlook reinstall resulting in Outlook not opening

Apr 25, 2010 12:25AM PDT

A few days ago I had a problem with the Outlook in Microsoft Office 2010 beta. When I reinstalled the program, something went wrong and it would freeze at a point in the insallation process, and never would open my .pst file.

I tried fully uninstalling Office, but this did not solve the problem. I tried repairing it with the installation program, and this did not help. There seems to be something left on my computer that is stopping the install. The Microsoft web site does not help with the Office 2010 beta, and am really stuck.

I have a couple month old Toshiba 64 bit system running on Windows 7 64 home edition.

Please help!

Discussion is locked

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Re: problems uninstalling beta
Apr 25, 2010 5:49AM PDT

That's the risk with a beta. They concentrate on functionality, not on (un)installability. Now report it as a bug, and continue with an older version of Office until this is resolved.

Kees

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Beta.
Apr 25, 2010 5:57AM PDT

If you want to try again, you have to consider the risks. It is beta and as such may be buggy. But looking past that the most common install problems I encounter is that the protection software is stepping into action and blocking something.

At its worst I find I disconnect from the internet and uninstall the third party firewall and antivirus suites plus everything else "protection" related then try the install again.

If it fails I look at the Event Viewer.

-> There is one other thing. Windows 7 has been showing up with "Activators" and those are proving to be nothing but trouble.
Bob

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Just today ...
Apr 25, 2010 6:08AM PDT

(on XP) I had a very innocent install of a small freeware program. Somehow, it stalled at 16% writing the very first file (uninstall.exe). I tried with Avast realtime protection off, and that didn't help. Then I tried on 2 other PC's (one XP with the same Avast on, one 98 without any antivirus). Both went in 2 seconds or so.

Installing in Safe Mode was the solution on this machine. Something must have interfered. I've got no idea what. And it would take a lot of time (with even a non 100% chance of success) playing with uninstalling programs and stopping services to find out. So it will stay a mystery forever, unless it repeats itself with other programs and I find it worthwhile to dive into the issue.

So the one suggestion I have, based on this sad experience: try the reinstall in Safe Mode.

Kees
Kees

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Rebuilt to solve the problem
Apr 25, 2010 9:22PM PDT

Thanks to all for the ideas. Finally restored the computer to factory condiditon and after quite a bit of work have Outlook 2010 working again. Install was slowed by the keed to do massive updates to windows 7 and office that started automatically.

One big part of the problem was the Outlook 2010 email account setup process. I followed the recomendation to do the automatic setup, but that gave me an IMAT account when I have pop3. That stalled the Outlook program, and may have been what caused my ariginal problem. Highly recommend you manually set up email accounts on Outlook 2010 and not use the Microsoft recommended automatic setup.

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(NT) Good job. Thanks for telling.
Apr 25, 2010 9:28PM PDT