Reinstalling Outlook 2002 safely

[wlgriffiths]

Microsoft came out of nowhere today and knocked me on my a**, and I was
having such a productive day. Now I'm spending my time trying to get
simple products to work.

First, my sob story:
We use Office 2002 here in my office. Up until today, everything has
worked perfectly. The boss wants me to start getting acquainted with
MS Project so I went looking for it on my computer. I discovered, for
the first time, that we have what appears to be an entire version of MS
Office 2003 in the start menu. It turned out to be a trial version,
which I did not realize until I had attempted to open MS Word 2003.
When I did so, it prompted me for a product key, which I went searching
through my original computer stuff to find, where when I found it I
realized it was just a trial version.

So I decided not to use it. Sounds simple, right? Not so easy with
these products. Now that I had opened the Pandora's box of this MS
Word 2003 trial version, it wouldn't release its grip on all my .doc
files. Now when I clicked on a .doc it would attempt to open in Word
2003; ask for a product key, and if i refused to enter it the program
would just close down again. I tried to re-assign the .doc files to
the old version of Word, but XP would paternalistically assume I had
really meant 2003 and would stick Word 2003 in whenever I selected Word
2002. Doesn't really surprise me; I've had problems like this with MS
products before.

Sob story's almost over. So I went to add/remove programs and found
Office 2003 and uninstalled it. Now I'm back to being able to access
Word 2002 and Excel 2002 and Outlook 2002, but none of them is working
right. Word and Excel are always trying to install new fonts and
giving me error messages, but what worries me the most is Outlook 2002.
I can't send or receive email, unless I pop in the install disk and
let it try to fix itself. Nor can I export all of my email, which is
something I'd like to do before I try any reinstalling.

So my question is this: how can I ensure that all my email gets
retained in the case of a reinstall of Outlook 2002? With Word and
Excel all the files are stored separate from the program, but I have no
idea where Outlook.

Any suggestions? Thanks

 

[bxb7668]

Whenever I've reinstalled Office (including Outlook) in the past, I
did not lose any of the settings or files.

 

[garfield-n-odie]

See http://www.slipstick.com/config/backup.htm .

 

[Don MI]

Your Outlook mail is contained in outlook.pst file. The file is hidden.
You can find by doing a search with hidden files enabled or by opening
Outlook 2002 and going to Tools, Options, Mail Setup tab and click on Data
Files. If you copy this file to another location you will have a backup.

I suggest you go to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs and select Office XP
{2002} and then click on Change/Remove and do a repair of your installation.
Or, insert your installation CD and do the same. Normally a repair does not
destroy data files.

Without alarming you more {I hope}, the format used by Outlook 2003 is not
compatible with the format used by prior versions. Yet, the Outlook 2003
file is stored in the same location as was the file for Outlook 2002. I am
not clear on what all you did. If you managed to create a Outlook 2003
outlook.pst file to replace the outlook.pst file from Outlook 2002, you will
not be able to open it in Outlook 2002 after you do your repair. Hopefully
this did not occur. If it did the following may help:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011190371033.aspx

Or, try posting back for more help.

Don