The set of folders could not be opened.

J

Jasminder Rai

Using Outlook 2003, with latest Office updates applied and using WinXP. I am
getting the following error message:

"Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Unable to open the Outlook window.
The set of folders could not be opened. The server is not available. Contact
your administrator if this condition persists."

This happens about once on a daily basis. This is what I am doing to get
over it right now - once this message comes up, I re-boot
(Start-Shutdown-Restart) my machine and everything works fine after the
re-boot. If I just Log Off instead of restarting the computer, the problem
does *not* go away.

Anyone seen this before or have a solution.

Jay
 
W

Wai Doan Hsu

Jasminder Rai said:
Using Outlook 2003, with latest Office updates applied and using WinXP. I am
getting the following error message:

"Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Unable to open the Outlook window.
The set of folders could not be opened. The server is not available. Contact
your administrator if this condition persists."

This happens about once on a daily basis. This is what I am doing to get
over it right now - once this message comes up, I re-boot
(Start-Shutdown-Restart) my machine and everything works fine after the
re-boot. If I just Log Off instead of restarting the computer, the problem
does *not* go away.

Anyone seen this before or have a solution.

Jay
Click to expand...

I had this problem when I first installed Outlook 2003. I went to the
Microsoft Knowledge base and found nothing relevant. They give some
information about PST's and locations, but that's not the problem if
your situation is intermittent.

In my case, I have a MAPI application running. My Cybergenie voice
mail and phone system access my Outlook address book for the phone
directory and contacts, and my voice mail goes to Outlook. Also, the
company that made it, Cygnion, is out of business.

It turned out that if I turn off my phone system, then Outlook
launched just fine. It may be a matter of shutting things down in
your system until you find the problem. If something is running as a
service, you might not see it as an "application" and it might be part
of the problem.

The other issue is that once I started Outlook, I could no longer
bring up my phone system. One ran or the other, but not both at the
same time.

It turned out that the MAPI application was looking for the registry
key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail\Microsoft Office Outlook

But the new Outlook 2003 created the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail\Microsoft Outlook

When I took the contents of the second key and exported them, created
the other key, and imported(and overwrote an essentially blank key
with)it, then it got things running.

I don't know if this key issue is unique to my software, but I suspect
that there are other MAPI clients out there that could have the same
or a similar problem. If it is only happening sometimes, that's
consistent with what you would get with a MAPI application that is
sometimes open.

Do you have any software that syncs to a hand held device or anything
else that reads your Outlook 2003 data? If so, try shutting it down in
the prescribed way, and see if it helps. If you isolate it to a
specific piece of software, then check with that vendor.
 
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