Improving the Prognosis When Outlook Freezes on Startup

Starting With a Bleak Outlook A DOS device name bug that exploited a stability hole in Windows 9.x. By carefully crafting an HTML e-mail message, an attacker could create the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD) when the message was read. Under certain conditions, if that gaffed e-mail were the first message in the Inbox, the BSOD would occur before Outlook had completely loaded, preventing the user from accessing any other messages in their Inbox. While this specific DOS device name bug was patched soon after, the problem with Outlook processing messages before the user selects them still remains. Preview Pane Problems The problem stems from Outlook's ability to preview e-mail messages before the user opens them. If Preview Pane is enabled, then just highlighting the message

will display its contents in the preview window. So if the first message in the list has a virus, or data corruption, Outlook will process it immediately -- before the user has a chance to decide. This is especially annoying during the Outlook start up process, because Outlook will lockup, sometimes before it even has a chance to open the Inbox. In our tests on Outlook 2000 running on a PC with Windows 2000, the freeze occurred during the opening Outlook splash screen. After launching the application, the Outlook welcome screen appeared and wouldn't leave. In some cases, opening the task manager showed Outlook running but not responding. In others, Outlook is using more that 95% of the CPU. In all cases, we were never able to access the Inbox. For the inexperienced user, this situation appears as though the Outlook programs is corrupted or is unable to find all of its pieces. When actually, Outlook has loaded but is getting stuck on a damaged e-mail message. This condition may look bleak, but there is something that the e-mail user can do to rifle through all that junk mail again. Preview Panacea Microsoft has acknowledged this problem in an older Knowledgebase article. They recommend that users start Outlook using a command-line switch that prevents auto-previewing. Command-line switches allow users to run applications with special options enabled (or disabled). To use the Outlook /nopreview switch, open the Windows Run dialog box (Ctrl-Esc, R) and type the complete path to Outlook.exe. We tried following Microsoft's instructions by enclosing the path in quotes just as you see here: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Outlook.exe" /nopreview However, this produced an error message on some of our machines that said, "Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. MAPI32.DLL is corrupt or the wrong version…" We did have luck using only 8.3 names in the path. So instead of the previous example, we typed the following: C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~2\Office>outlook /nopreview This produced the desired results, by launching Outlook without the Preview Pane. The /nopreview startup switch will disable the Preview Pane and remove Preview Pane from the View menu option. Once we reached the Outlook Inbox, we were able to delete the offending e-mail message or move it to another folder. Once this was complete, we were able to restart Outlook normally (without the /nopreview switch) and everything worked fine.