Outlook 2013 or Outlook 2010 Crashes at Startup

I took a vacation day yesterday and I came back today to someone having issues with Outlook not responding. Basically getting this dialog box every time they opened the application or deleting mail from there inbox.

It was driving the user crazy, so I had to get it up and running. I’ve seen this in the past and did the basic troubleshooting steps, which consist of rebuilding the database, re-installing Office (what a pain), running Outlook into safe mode and disabling all the plugins. At first, disabling the plugins worked, but the user called again and Outlook continued to crash. I noticed that each time the user click on an email with images that’s when Outlook stopped working and crashed, so I went inside trusted location inside options and disabled the option to download image automatically.

This started to work, but again the user called again and stated the crashing continued. There was another option and that was to check if Microsoft Office had any updates available. Apparently, her machine was up-to-date. Okay, the user is running Office 2010 – lets upgrade to Office 2013 and see if that works out. The upgrade was a success, but again I received the call from the user and it was crashing again with the new version. You might be saying to yourself, remove everything and do a clean install. The user can’t afford anymore downtime – she’s the Vice President of the company. I remember she mentioned that the computer received some updates and that’s when everything started to happen. So, I rushed to Windows Updates and located the Installed Windows Updates section to see what was pushed out.

The last thing that was pushed out to the machine was KB3097877, so I removed it and rebooted the machine – crossing my fingers and praying to the tech gods that this was the solution. When the computer came back up, I remote into the user’s computer and checked it out. Everything seemed to work fine and I haven’t received a call from the user yet.

At the end, sometime it’s not the best to push down all the updates to your machine. Microsoft updates are known for crashing computers or corrupting things that it shouldn’t be corrupting at all – Live and Learn. What a day! I need another vacation day.

-Peace!