I have been trying out Office 2007 on one of my personal computers, to see if it could give me a productivity increase or something (in addition to the software looking a bit more sexy).
Anyway, it didn't do anything for me, and it was painfully slow on my computer, so I decided to downgrade to Office 2003. First thing I noticed, was how Outlook suddenly was missing from my Office installation. That was fixed by the elegant "fix/reinstall" option of the installer, I got my hopes up again, and I actually thought I was ready.
But then, when I tried to start Outlook, it crashed at startup, saying: "Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. MAPI32.DLL is corrupt or the wrong version. This could have been caused by installing other messaging software. Please reinstall Outlook."
Yah. So I tried that. Reinstalling is fun. Same message. Googled a bit, found a few solutions to how I could replace the MAPI32 file. But finally I found the answer, and the hero of today is: Futility. I had to rename a file called MSMAPI32.DLL. I should have known.
Truth being told, the solution was also well described @Microsoft Support (it was the next two Google hit for the error message :-) Anyway, thanks for fixing my Outlook; I'm back on track.
Lessons learned today: Never trust the error message (even though I thought all software engineers put most of their effort into writing crystal clear error messages?!), and do a thorough Google search (I usually do...) before reinstalling Windows.
Thanks so much for the props on my blog. It's so nice to be a hero (even though all I did was expand on the MS article and type up what helped.)
Again..thanks and glad your problems are solved!
Cheers
Posted by: aa!2on | 07 July 2007 at 04:49