Corrupted (?) database; upgrade to 2004 not connecting toserver??; Microsoft Framework X library err

[Levin, Michael]

I'm running Entourage v.X on a Mac with Panther (10.3.9). I've got the
latest patches from Microsoft applied. My identity database was about 2.6
Gigs and everything was working fine for about a year. In the last couple of
days, I've had the following problems, which I'm hoping someone can help me
with. First, I have a number of identities, in order to get around the 4 Gig
limit problem. I noticed that one of my older identities (which I hadn't
used in a long time but which used to work fine, used to look up old emails)
had been blanked out - all the messages were gone and the file size of the
database was down to some small Kb size. Very weird. A little while later,
Entourage wouldn't start - said database needed to be rebuilt. I tried a
couple of times to do the "typical rebuild", and each time it would go to
almost the end, and then quit saying the disk was too full to continue. I
have 125 Gigs available on my disk... In the meantime, Microsoft Word
started putting up the error "An unexpected error occurred while trying to
load the Microsoft Framework X library" whenever I started Word. I looked it
up on the web and it said something about locked files in the identity
folder, but I had no such locked files. I thought that upgrading to Office
2004 might fix this (if it was better able to deal with large files and
might have fixed whatever bug caused it to think it was running out of disk
space) so I downloaded the Office 2004 test drive and installed it on
another machine. It installed ok and supposedly imported all of my Entourage
info, but it didn't seem to connect to our Exchange server even though the
account settings had been imported. I ended up having to restore my
Entourage identity database from the previous night's backup - everything
works (Entourage and Word) but I lost the day's saved emails of course.
Could someone please help me with the following questions:

1) Entourage v.X - the limit is 4 Gigs, not 2 Gigs, right?

2) any reason why an old identity database might get completely blanked out?
The file wasn't deleted (it wasn't a file system problem) - it's there, just
empty of messages when I switch to it (and has a modify date of last week -
and I didn't switch to it last week, so no one used it then!).

3) is there anything I should know about upgrading to Office 2004? Is it
better than v.X with database problems (i.e., is it worth it)? And, what do
I need to do, besides choosing "import from Entourage" when running it for
the first time, to get it to actually sync with our Exchange server like my
v.X does?

4) what is this Framework X library problem and what else can cause it
besides locked files?

Thanks in advance!!

Mike

 

[Allen Watson]

I'm only trying to answer a small part of your questions. The Framework
thing is an error that crops up when you have more than one version of
Office installed. For me, it never caused problems, but the safest
thing to do is to uninstall Office (use the Remove Office procedure
that, in Office 2004, is found in the /Microsoft Office2004/Additional
Tools/ folder). Then install 2004. If you don't want to remove your old
version, then try making an archive of your older Office folder (which
contains the applications), and then delete the original. You can then
unzip your archive when you want to go back to the original version.

With your old identity that shrunk to a tiny size, it sounds as though
at some point the original identity folder was moved or deleted, and
then you switched to that identity (or started Entourage while it was
set to that identity), and a new, empty database of the same name was
created. Search your disks to see if you have a folder with that
identity name somewhere else on your disk. If not...it's gone.