[ms office - 2003] Personal Folder Problem

[Reaper]

One of our users has developed a problem with Office 2003 over the last few months. When he opens up the application a message is displayed that says:

 

 

"Unable to display the folder. Another application closed unexpectedly while using your Personal Folders File "File location". To prevent potential damage to your personal folders file it will not be available until you close all applications currently using it"

 

 

I did wonder if it was linked to iTunes as he had that installed but that has been uninstalled and the plugin disabled. Any ideas?

 

 

 

Thanks

[srochford]

There's a program called scanpst - details here - which can be used to fix PST problems and it might be worth trying that in case the message is wrong.

 

the other thing to do is to see if the PST is being held open by another process. Download process explorer and run it; search for the PST file (or just "PST") and you'll see which process is holding open the file

[Reaper]

It is actually an .ost file (which I am currently running the Repair program on). I have looked around at turning off Offline Outlook Files but the options that are meant to do it, won't allow me.

 

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP052422641033.aspx

 

The button it refers to 'Disable Offline Use' is greyed out.

[srochford]

Close Outlook, delete the OST file - there's nothing in it you need.

 

When Outlook starts it will just re-create the OST file (OST files allow you to run Outlook in off-line mode; they do sometimes get messed up but as they're just a cache of what's on the server there's no harm in deleting them although don't do this if the only way to re-cache is over a dial up modem!)