Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Unable to open the Outlook window. (A solution to a frustrating problem)

As I'm sure you're all aware, every Microsoft error message is helpful, complete, and crystal clear, right? Well, maybe not. My most recent adventure with an error message told me something I already knew, but nothing more. Here's the deal.

I had a short power outage this evening at my house wherein I learned just how overdue I am to replace the battery in my uninterpretable power supply (UPS). My Dell XPS 410 went "lights-out" right in the middle of installing a new application. Outlook 2007 wasn't even open, although I had only closed it seconds earlier (the process may have still be running). Upon restarting the computer and attempting to open Outlook I was faced with the following error:

This error message displayed each time I attempted to open Outlook 2007 on my Windows Vista machine.

After a couple of restarts and some basic troubleshooting I was beginning to get frustrated.  Google searches didn't seem to help much initially, as most of the results referenced an issue when using Windows XP and attempting to open Outlook in Win95/ME compatibility mode.  I'm running a 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate and I most certainly am not running Outlook in in compatibility mode (who would run anything in 95/ME compatibility mode, anyway?).

A bit more searching and pulling together suggestions from a few different forums on the Internet led me to a very simple solution.  Open Outlook from the 'Start' or 'Start>Run' dialog box as follows:

Outlook.exe /resetnavpane

Outlook should start up with no errors.  I hope this helps someone and prevents the dreaded reinstall of Office (which was, in my mind, the next logical solution to this issue).

Samsung New PC Studio and Microsoft Windows 7

Well there is never a dull moment in the life of a techie, and Christmas is certainly no exception. This year we got our daughter a new cell phone, the Samsung Mythic a897 Phone (AT&T). It came with an installation CD-ROM and a data cable. So I set about attempting to install Samsung’s New PC Studio on my daughter’s laptop that is running Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium. It failed!

From the error messages displayed, it was failing to install the drivers for the phone. So after searching both Samsung’s site and AT&T’s site for Windows 7 specific drivers, I couldn't find any that looked trustworthy.

I had to make Windows 7 run the software while essentially fooling the software into believing that it wasn’t being installed on Microsoft’s newest operating system.

The first thing I did was go to the Samsung Mythic website and get the latest version of the software.

Once I had the new version of the software downloaded, I right clicked on the file to get the context menu and clicked on 'Troubleshoot Compatibility'.

Then I selected the 'Troubleshoot program' link.

Here is where you specify that the program worked with an earlier version of Windows.

I chose Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) and clicked next.

Here is where you have to pay attention.  Click on the 'Start the program...' button.  This will start the install of the Samsung New PC Studio software .  Allow the software to finish installing before returning to this dialog box.  Once the software has fully installed, then click the 'Next' button.

That will bring up the following dialog box.  Click on the 'Yes, save these settings for this program' button.  This way if you ever need to uninstall and reinstall the program, you will not have to deal with the incompatibility issues since this will save the settings needed to allow this software to run on your PC.

Finally enjoy your new phone and its software.