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Act 2007/Outlook integration problem (act9ext.dll errors)

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jpkage

jpkage

Technical User
Feb 26, 2003
7
US
Hello All,

We have upgraded from version 2005 to 2007 recently (Act 9 for Workgroups, server running sql and 22 machines connecting in). Most of the users are having trouble with the Outlook integration.

The primary issue being Outlook crashing with the standard MS "This program has encountered an error.." and then another error box coming up saying:

"Outlook experienced a serious error the last time the add-in 'c:\windows\system32\act9ext.dll' was opened. Would you like to disable this add-in? ..."

We have done all of the troubleshooting associated with fixing Outlook integration issues, and none of it has fixed the problem. When we rebuild the Outlook profile, it seems to help for a bit, but now most of our users are facing the same problems again. In addition to this error, we are also having Outlook ramdomly close for no reason. There are no errors and you can go right back in.

When I remove the Act address book and the add-in, all problems go away. Has anyone else had any run in with this sort of issue?

System information:
Windows 2000 domain
Exchange 2000 (no cached mode option available)
Outlook XP
Act 9 for WG's running as a shared db on a Win2k3 server
22 workstations/laptops (over half purchased in the past few months)

Any suggestions are greatly welcomed!

Thanks,
jpk
 
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Hi Mike,

Thanks a lot for the reply. We are currently running Act version 9.0.1.162, Hotfix 1 on all machines.

I will certainly go and double check some of the things in the article you suggested. However, I'm not sure that any of those issues seem to fit for us. Many of the machines were straight from Dell and clean aside from the OS. One of the machines having trouble has since been rebuilt from a complete format. If MDAC is the culprit, I would think that machine would be working without problems. It doesn't hurt to check though.

As for another suggestion in there as to it potentially being script blocking. We are running Symantec Corporate Edition 10.x on all of the clients and servers. From what I've been able to gather, there's no "script blocking" component as there is with the stand-alone versions. I'll try turning off the antivirus on one of the users that's suffering from this error the most and see what happens.

Thanks again for the info. If you come up with anything else, please send it my way.

jpk
 
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I think you're right that SAV does have script blocking ... it's my choics - Norton without all the crap bloatware

You could also try these: change the 7 to 9 in the dll names

Here's another possibility
Regards,
Mike Lazarus
ACT! Evangelist
GL Computing, Aust
 
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Hi Mike (and anyone else who wants to chime in),

I've tested some of the things you suggested and a few things of my own to no avail! Copying the original act9ext.dll to the pc didn't help at all. In addition to that, I also rebuilt one of the users entire logon profile. They had been using a roaming profile and I wanted to eliminate that as a potential issue. Even with a clean local profile, they continued to get errors with Outlook and Act.

I will still attempt to mess around with MDAC and MSDE, although I'm not sure how those can really be the issue. We were really hoping this version of Act would fix a lot of the old Act 2005 issues we had, but instead we received a whole new batch! I'm starting to this this program will never work right.

Any other ideas out there would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
jpk
 
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Mike,

As a side note, I ran across your posting a few days ago with your suggestions on uninstalling and reinstalling Act. I'm going to give that a go tomorrow and see if it makes any difference. At this point, I'm grasping at straws and will try anything! I'll let ya know how it goes.
 
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Odd that it happens on all you machines (right?) - I've not seen anyone with this issue in 9.0

Maybe try, in Windows Explorer to open %UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Outlook and rename extend.dat

Another idea is to do a full uninstall of ACT! using uninstaller.exe (check the ACT! knowledge base) and reinstall in Windows Selective Startup Mode

Regards,
Mike Lazarus
ACT! Evangelist
GL Computing, Aust
 
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So far nothing has worked! I took one of the notebooks that encounters the issue way more frequently and performed the uninstall/reinstall that you suggested to another user. I gave the user her computer back and didn't even get back to my desk before Outlook bombed out. Here is what I've tried so far:

1. Copy act9ext.dll from original cd to system32 folder
2. Normal uninstall/reinstall
3. Install w/o virus software running
4. No AV running, reinstall in SS mode as you suggested and installed .net separately
5. Renamed extend.dat
6. Removed roaming profile for user and created local one
7. Recreated Outlook 2002 profile

At this point, we basically cannot use the Outlook integration piece of Act9. It is, unfortunately, one of the main reasons we upgraded. The last thing I will try is to install Outlook 2003 and see if that works any better. Perhaps Sage decided they didn't care about older version of Outlook and the bug lies there. Any other thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
jpk
 
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I'd love to chime in but alas, I have no Office 2002 machines to test with. I will say, though, that every Office 2003 system I've worked with, and Office 2000 for that matter, have worked perfectly.

~Melagan
______
"It's never too late to become what you might have been.
 
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I did try to install in selective startup mode without any luck. For whatever reason, something in our domain sure upsets that dll and crashes Outlook like crazy. I'm not one to give up, but I'm pretty much stumped.

Thanks,
jpk
 
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I can only suggest contacting support... I suspect it might need someone to connect remotely to one of your systems and actually have a look at what's conflicting.

There's not much I don't know in ACT!, but I haven't seen this error since ACT! 2005.

Regards,
Mike Lazarus
ACT! Evangelist
GL Computing, Aust
 
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Did you ever find out how to fix it. I was originally using outlook 2000 and couldn't get my activities to update at all. Then I switched to outlook 2002, the activities updated but then outlook started crashing. Did a lot of things, not sure what I did but got the two updating perfectly for about three hours. Then I got a message that my actext.dll could not be installed so I copied the files from the disk and put them in my system32 folder like the act site said, and now...the updates have completely stopped working again. I really don't know what to do.
 
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Hi Laragold,

I really don't have any good information for you regarding your issues, as we still have them ourselves. Here is what I do know from our own research..

Sage, like many others who code against Outlook, use a wrapper called redemption to get around the security messages that come up in Outlook. Our guess is that the act9ext.dll is poorly coded against redemption and therefore causes crashing issues with Outlook 2002. In the end, our programmer here has rewritten the Outlook integration component of Act so that we can scrap their dll and use our own COM addin to have e-mail correspondence recorded within Act contacts. We've only just started to test it out so I can't say for sure it is going to fix all the errors, but so far so good.

As for synching between Act and Outlook, we've still got problems with that as well. Our reseller went to Act with the problems we were having (which are reproducible on any copy of Act) and they basically said 'Oh!, that sucks!' Our reseller's answer was to use a third party program called CompanionLink. Their testing with that program showed that all of our issues were fixed. Unfortunately, it's $50 per license and we shouldn't have to buy another program to fix something the program itself has built-in!

It's too bad that Act's own "features" need to be rewritten by others in order to work correctly. In any case, that's where we are at with it all.

If you contact Sage, good luck! If I can be of any assistance, let me know.

jpkage
 
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Hey There, Just ran into this my self. For me it was all about the SQL. Uninstall everything including the previous version you have on there and reinstall from THE CD! Hope it helps.
 
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