I don't know if this is the forum for this, but I would expect you guys to appreciate it since many of you got outlook 2002, which apparently is interchangably referred to as outlook XP, and if you installed it from your Dell cd, you might very well have had Outlook 2000 along with the rest of Office 2000 installed, and like myself assumed that well it must be better and may be necessary for active sync, and of course Microsoft certainly has the installation of what must be it's number two(no pun intended) revenue generator thoroughly squared away. Not. Let me just tell you in case you haven't figured it out, like I hadn't, the default installation of Outlook 2002 won't remove outlook 2000, it will install itself to
Program Files/Microsoft Office/Office 10, and leave Outlook 2000 and all the rest of Office 2000 in
Program Files/Microsoft Office/Office .
If like me you only launch it with the Start Menu quick launch toolbar or via some other app like IE, then you might not realize this, like me, and everything is fine. But if you run any setup on Office 2000, like say if you update it from the Microsoft Office website with a service pack, which there are 3 of btw, because of all the things you've heard about how vulnerable Outlook is, or because like me, it won't archive and your .pst is now 150mb and outlook takes 90 seconds to open on your 2.4 Ghz machine with 1 gig of DDR 333 and 120gb of free disk space, you could end up pretty screwed, not irreperably(in my case anyway, good luck to you), but not with an obvious solution. I went there for outlook 2002 updates and found that there had been 3 office 2000 service packs that I didn't have, I didn't run any outlook 2000 specific updates. If you do that and your outlook 2002 won't open at all and gives some DLL error, search google for the name of the dll and you'll find that running the 2000 setup via the service pack created a default profile which you have to set as not default in Control panel if you ran 2000 service pack after the outlook 2002 service pack because according to Microsoft, the outlook 2002 service pack resolves that profile thing. They refer to this scenario as upgrading to outlook 2002, reverting to 2000, then reupgrading to 2002
If you realized that starting outlook 2000 launches the outlook EULA and you have to keep going back and resetting that profile, and decide you want to uninstall outlook 2000 because, say, you want as much of that crap off your PC as possible, well, then outlook 2002 will stop working again, only it opens and everything, it just can't login to your mail server. So you go back to that mail thing in Control panel and do the test accounts button and it says congratulations, your mail setttings are correct. The one positive is that after that, the Outlook 2002 menu selection Help->detect and repair which you had previously determined to be some developer's gui coding practice, actually does something and will fix it so outlook 2002 can connect and work correctly, or at least work no less correctly than it did before.
I'll be backing up that .pst everytime I think of it for a while now.
