I've had issues recently with Outlook crashing when I shut it down. Initially I thought this was due to a rogue Outlook Addin (eg I've got Xobni, ClearContext, OutTwit and others installed). So I went through systematically getting rid of them. Put the problem persisted.
Finally I found the issue was to do with the actual .ost file being corrupted. The way I discovered this was by chance when trying to clear my Deleted items. Outlook gave me a message informing that the file was corrupt, and even better recommended using scanpst.exe to fix it.
I'd never heard of scanpst.exe but a quick Google check shows it has been around since the dark ages, and has been a regular in the Sys Admin's toolbox for years.
If you are looking for it you can find it in your c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office 12\ folder or equivalent.
Everything Outlook related needs to be closed down (eg Mobile Device Sync) and then you run it up. It'll prompt for the ost file and away you go.
Since repairing my file I've had no further issues with Outlook.
6 comments:
Craig,
Unfortunately, problems like this pop up pretty regularly in large mail files (independent of having any addins installed - but if you have misbehaving ones in place they'll increase your odds of problems). We put together a post on a number of tips to help prevent and fix these problems that you might find helpful: http://blog.clearcontext.com/2006/12/video_outlook_p.html
I stumbled accros your post in an effort to figure out why the heck I even had an Outlook.ost file. I ran the SCANPST.EXE and it declared that there were needed fixes. Great!
Now If i could only find the setting in Outlook that showed me how to get rid of this Outlook.ost file. I don't want to store anything locally. I want all my outlook data stored on Exchange.
Surprisingly my Outlook.ost file is just under 600MB and I have no idea what is in there.
I've got auto archiving turned on, but I explicitely state that oultook should remove the archived data and not archive it on my workstation.
So what's in this file? My search continues, but thanks for the scanpst.exe tip.
Hi Taylor,
The .ost file is the file Outlook creates for locally storing the Exchange mailbox - as far as I am aware you need it. In fact if you delete it, next time you connect to Exchange it will automatically rebuild it. This is why you can still read through email history even when offline.
This is also another way fixing corrupt files - just delete the .ost and Outlook will rebuild it for you.
Cheers,
Craig
The scanpst repair tool is good one. you article provides good information about how to repair ost and pst file.
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There is a good tool works with mails-repairing outlook,as how as i remember tool is free,it recover lost Microsoft Outlook data is a sequence of operations involving scanning, identifying and saving such Microsoft Outlook items as messages, contacts, notes, reminders, journals, meetings, etc, recover data when a *.pst file completely or partially stops functioning, for example, it becomes completely or partially unreadable because of other applications, antivirus software or power failures,it scans, identifies and saves data from the pst file without modifying or indexing the source pst file,can save various Microsoft Outlook items as separate files with the .eml, .vcf and .txt extensions,reading data from files created in Microsoft Outlook versions 97, 98, 2000, XP, 2002, 2003, 2007 and saving recovered data in the format of Microsoft Outlook versions 97, 98, 2000, XP, 2002, 2003, 2007.
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