Office 2002 closes, but small window stays on-screen and shut-down reports an error

[news.eternal-september.org]

A colleague has Office 2002 on her Dell PC running XP Pro with all the
updates. When she exits Outlook, a small box outline remains on the
desktop, which she can neither access nor close, and if she tries to shut
the computer down, she gets an error stating that Outlook is still running.

There's a screen print of the "ghost" box here:
http://i1115.photobucket.com/albums/k553/trentsc/office_shutdown.jpg.

Can anyone suggest what might be the cause of this, and how one might solve
the problem?



Many thanks

 

[VanguardLH]

news.eternal-september.org wrote:
(Next time use your own moniker, not the name of the NNTP server you
happen to be using at the time.)

A colleague has Office 2002 on her Dell PC running XP Pro with all the
updates. When she exits Outlook, a small box outline remains on the
desktop, which she can neither access nor close, and if she tries to shut
the computer down, she gets an error stating that Outlook is still running.

There's a screen print of the "ghost" box here:
http://i1115.photobucket.com/albums/k553/trentsc/office_shutdown.jpg.

Can anyone suggest what might be the cause of this, and how one might solve
the problem?

Many thanks

Closing a window is NOT the same as exiting the program. After
"closing" Outlook, go look in Task Manager's Processes tab to see if
there are still remnant outlook.exe process(es) (and also check for
remnant winword.exe process(es) if she elected to use Word as the e-mail
editor). If they are there then it is likely an add-on got installed
that isn't compatible with that version of Outlook or is screwed up.

Have her load Outlook in its safe mode ("outlook.exe /safe") which does
not load any installed add-ons. If exiting Outlook then has the
outlook.exe (and winword.exe) process disappear within half a minute of
asking Outlook to exit then the likely problem is a bad add-on.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Failure by Outlook to close properly has been a long established failing
that Microsoft is aware of and attending to (though whether any fix when it
comes will address versions back to 2002 is anyone's guess) . In the
meantine www.slipstick.com/problems/close.asp offers suggestions and links
to a couple of small utilities that help address the situation.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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