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Help - Word fails when opening a document from Outlook

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gscheepers

IS-IT--Management
Jan 21, 2002
150
US
Hi,

I have a user that persistent have problems opening Word documents from Outlook. Word would open and then simply display a message "Word has encountered a problem....." and then you're unable to continue and have to close Word using the task manager.

On previous occations we had to delete his roaming profile and reconfigure it again for the problem to go away, but we're getting fed-up with doing this every time.

If you save the document to his user area or ie the desktop it opens fine without any problems.

Has anyone come accross this before???

Any help would be highly appreciated!

Thanks,

Gerhard
 
Which version of Outlook/Word?


Regards: tf1
 
Yes, same problem here. User is on Windows XP and Office 2000. No solution found so far.
 
Look for mail.dot in the user's profile and delete it. (Note that it may be email.dot: it's 8 years and 3 versions since I used Office 2000.)



Regards: tf1
 
It is also generally a bad idea to open Word documents directly from email. A separate file is created by Outlook, and the THAT one is opened.

This can lead to serious version conflicts. Why? Because if you open a Word document from Outlook, make changes and save....the saved document will no longer be the one that is attached. So if you later opened the email, and saved the attachedment, it will NOT be the one you had previous opened and saved.

This caused us such problems that we have disabled being able to open Word documents from email. Our staff must save the attachment, THEN open that.

Outlook is/was also sloppy about deleting those document files. They are real files, not pointers. One user had 6 Gb of files in a folder OLK42356, as they always opened documents from emails. Outlook kept them as real files.

NOTE: this is with version 2002. I believe later versions are better behaved.

faq219-2884

Gerry
My paintings and sculpture
 
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