Outlook 2000 hangs on exit

[esmithbda]

When closing Outlook (2000) on one of our user's machines, it will hang indefinitely on the closing window that says something to the effect of "Please wait while Outlook exits" - if left alone, that will stay up pretty much forever.

On the surface, it appears to be similar to Q223952 - but regardless as to whether one sends a message at all or if Word was never open - this still happens.

The only "fix" that MS gives on that one other than "close Word first" (which isn't much help since in this case Word was never open), is to kill the MAPISP32 and OUTLOOK processes in the task manager.
That is all well and good if this rarely happened - but this is now happening every single time the person wants to close Outlook.

This user does use Word as his editor (Word 2000) - I went into his settings and changed it so that it doesn't use Word as the editor... still hangs. I then changed it so that it didn't use Microsoft Outlook Rich Text Format and instead plain text - still hangs.

Any ieas on how to fix this or why it just started out of the blue?

 

[esmithbda]

Finally found Q834005 which points out that if a user accesses a mailbox with an Outlook 2003 client and then later goes back to Outlook 2000, they are going to have this problem.

This user that I have was upgraded to Outlook 2003 and didn't like it since he couldn't use Word 2000 as his editor. We are too cheap to upgrade everyone in the office to Office 2003 and upgrading just one person would throw off many things we have setup here.
So back to Outlook 2000 he went, and up came this problem.

Note that a quick fix is the /cleanfreebusy switch, but apparently that will only work briefly and you either have to keep doing it, or apply the hot fix at Q834005.

The hotfix requires that you have all Office service packs up to SP3 installed on the machine and then you can install the hotfix.
In order to get the hotfix, you can't get it directly off of the MS website - you have to contact them first. Depending on where in the world you live, and the time constraints you are under, you will find that this can be a major headache.

I certainly don't advocate it and would recommend only going through MS since you can at least trust their files to be... well, as good as MS files are.
If you search around and get it from someone else, say on Experts Exchange by doing a search on Google for "Outlook hangs on shutdown" - then you are clearly at your own risk there for any number of bad things not limited to virus and/or any legal issues.

 

[jtorrey2]

I have reinstalled the outlook 2000 on the clients computer and still the damn sign hangs around after the outlook is closed. I have tried almost everything and cannot get it fixed so far. Do you have any resolve to this issue besides calling Microsoft and installing the service pack?

 

[esmithbda]

There are apparently a few cases that cause it to hang around - but if you went from 2003 back to 2000, then that is indeed the case.

No matter how many reinstalls, rebuilds, or the debug/fixes that you try, it won't help.

The Outlook /cleanfreebusy will apparently fix it for "awhile" (1-4 days) but eventually it will come up again.

The only fix (that I can find, and this is confirmed on other sites/searches as well) is that on Q834005 (

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;834005)

If you really don't want to have to call MS (understandable for many reasons), then I would suggest looking at this thread (

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Applications/MS_Office/Outlook/Q_20886730.html)

- there is a site that has it (but it is password protected, so you will need to contact the person) about halfway down.
There is also a link to it (not password protected) towards the end of the thread (at the time I am writing this - it is entirely feasible that more will be added to the thread over time and it will no longer be near the end).

Remember that 1) you can't really trust things you download and claim to be something, and 2) however you get the fix, the machine will still need up to Office SP3 on it for the fix to work.