Customer cannot run outlook… He recently moved house (I recently gotten calls from many people who have recently moved house… maybe its house moving season 🙂 ).

Over the phone, I find out he has broadband, and web surfing still works, but the whole PC seems slow.

When I get there, sure enough, starting outlook gives a runtime error in outlook.exe. you can actually see the emails and email folders behind the error message… so close, yet so far!

I run through some simple tests (ie start outlook in safe mode: outlook /safe), but the error persists.

I start XP in safe mode, but I still get the error.

I start doing a virus / spyware scan, but I cannot see any obvious signs of infection. While I’m there, I also do some “tuning” ie I disable things like ituneshelper, webclient service, etc… just to speed things up a bit.

In the end, nothing I do can fix it. I take the PC to the office for some in depth analysis.

While trawling the net, I eventually come across this nice article:

http://www.pctoday.com/techsupport/detail.aspx?guid=&ErrorID=32867

It seems that norton antispam and MS outlook cannot live together… Symantec blames Microsoft, and microsoft blames symantec/norton. No one takes responsibility, and the customers suffer for it.

The workaround (as long as you don’t need norton antispam) is to navigate to c:Program FilesCommon FilesSymantec SharedAntiSpam

find the file called msouplug.dll, and rename it to something else (I like: msouplug.dlll ie 3 L’s instead of 2)

Restart the computer, and outlook works like a dream (maybe a bad dream, but at least there are no errors).