Outlook and Ghost of Users Past

[The_Doc_Man]

:banghead::banghead::banghead:
There, I feel so much better now.

Short tale of woe: Wifey's trusty computer was nearly 14 years old. Don't want to know that in people years. Anyway, C: drive finally crashed hard. Bought her a new PC. Had to rebuild a bunch of things. One of those things was the Outlook setup.

We didn't remember her password so we called AT&T to update same. No problem. Worked using AT&T web mail to verify access. Had to update her laptop with the new password. It is also working. Installed Office 2010 on the new system. Started Outlook, defined her account. Wouldn't work. (Server error, connection refused.) But the password was right because the web mail interface uses the same account as the outlook interface.

I had an outlook account on my own system, so I made it a secondary account next to her Outlook. MY ACCOUNT WORKED!!! Hers didn't, on the same machine, with the same server addresses, ports, and parameters.

Went to another (working) machine. Copied/verified outlook settings (including that we are using alternate ports due to SSL vs. unsecured protocols) to her system. Triple-checked her account parameters. Incoming & outgoing servers (POP3 and SMTP) ARE named correctly. NSLOOKUP for both server names from her machine works. PING for both servers from her machine works. Web login works. Outlook on the new machine kept on telling me "server rejected login."

AT&T doesn't support Outlook so they draw the line at the point where the web mail works. Useless bunch of scumbuckets that they are... There went two empty hours of my life.

So after searching the web for a while, I stumbled across the fact that wifey's machine came bundled with Office 365, but the Office Depot people didn't have a detailed brochure because this was a close-out model. Decided that the ONLY solution was to remove both Office 365 and Office 2010 and then reboot to let it clean up. Then reinstall Office 2010 with no chance of cross-contamination of files from the two versions. Did that. No errors during re-install.

So now when I try to launch Outlook it says "can't find the .pst files." It refuses to even let me get to a point where I might be able to add a new users. It just exits. Well... the .PST files really ARE gone, perhaps because I had planned to start over again from scratch and therefore had deleted the files! There were no such files any more.

The only thing that HADN'T been de-installed and deleted was, of course, the registry. Sure enough, when I searched the registry, I found some .PST file references, which the on-line articles I found said could be deleted since I WANTED the profiles to go away. Edited and then exited the registry.

When I next launched Outlook, it bitched about not finding the .PST files. Soo more web searches. Supposedly there is an OUTLOOK.OST file (Offline post office data) that, if I deleted it, would reset Outook to think it had just been installed so it would ask me for a user account. But.... can't find such a file in any folder and there is no pointer to it in the registry.

I've searched the web for hours. Literally! There is no place left for the damned Outlook profiles to be remembered. No place. Yet it remembers and because it can't find the .PST files, it won't let me get to the user account display to create a new account.

Has anyone faced this phantom resurrection of a deleted account before? Can you point me to a place where those files might exist?

 

[NauticalGent]

Wow Doc, it is a rare day when you do not have an answer. I wish I could help, but have already ruled out more things than I would have thought of... However, when I was having issues with linked outlook folders and could not find answers in Access forums, I went here:

http://www.outlookcode.com/

Here I found a young lady names Sue Mosher. I have talked with her on the phone and exchanged more emails that can be counted with modern technology. And even though she did not provide me a fix, she DID help me rule out what it wasn't and sometimes that is just as valuable.

Bottom line, if it's OutLook, she's your answer.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Here is what worked after three more hours of web searching. My diagnosis is that something (an UNKNOWN something) was corrupted by the first install because I didn't catch that Office 365 was on the system so some infrastructure was already in place. See discussion below regarding possible places with such infrastructure.

I had a legal, multi-platform copy Of2010 (and besides, was decomming wifey's old system) so why pay $99 a year for a product with features I won't use anyway? So I had to remove office 2010 and office 365. Cleaned up the user directories. Got rid of all files I could find that even LOOKED like Outlook might have something to do with them.

Remember, my goal was not to use existing outlook accounts. It was to force outlook to restart as though it had no accounts at all. Which wasn't happening, if you read my previous post, because my quick-and-dirty cleanup was too quick and left behind too much dirt.

So... files were ok - but the registry was still messy. Ran REGEDIT. Warning: This next is not for the faint of heart. For Office 2010, Outlook stores things in THREE places in the registry.

First place is the registry HKEY_LOCAL_USER >> Software >> Microsoft >> Office >> Outlook and then you have to search for .PST among the keys. You have to search for both key names and key values. There will be an entry with one of those "{gobbledegook number}" sequences for which sub-keys contain the user e-mail name and the name of the post-office file (.PST), which is in Users/<username>/Documents/Outlook... somewhere. You can delete those keys. They are created again for new accounts, so the loss is just temporary.

But once you found the first Outlook keys, you aren't done yet! Keep on searching. Don't delete the associations and such, but there will be a "Profiles" key group that you can also delete. Look in the key values, you will see what I mean.

Think you're done? Ha! NOW you have to find the Windows Messaging portion of the registry, drill down, and realize that there is an Outlook group there, too. As noted earlier, I had uninstalled outlook. Therefore, I deleted that group entirely. But this one group is fascinating.

Here, the values are not shown as text strings, they are shown as byte arrays. Again, they have the function number-sequence names and brackets. If you find the longer keys and double-click on the binary icon next to the key name, a pop-up shows you the bytes of the long key but ALSO shows you the text represented by those keys. You will see your profile data there.

Exited REGEDIT. Then I searched the hard drive one last time for remnant .PST files - there were none. Looked for the file OUTLOOK.OST - but apparently wasn't there. Searched the registry one last time for the two account names. No further references.

So THEN I re-installed Ofc2010 on a system that should have had no memory of the prior profiles. When I launched the new installation of Outlook, it didn't barf this time. It asked me for info on the new accounts. I entered wifey's primary account and BINGO it worked. I still have to enter her secondary account but at least I'm confident that it was a conflicted or ragged installation that was the original culprit, plus the crap I left behind trying to do a "quick-and-dirty" cleanup.

I'm glad I'm so laid back after retirement. (Pardon me while I get over my coughing fit...) If this had happened with my wife in my absence, she would have called my tech-savvy step-daughter who would probably have cleaned her shotgun just for the purpose of finding some slow, stupid target at tier I of the Microsoft Outlook support team.

 

[NauticalGent]

Still laughing...dude, I really enjoy reading you posts. Even if I can't understand some of the stuff you write!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Yeah, sometimes I write "stream on consciousness" - but last night was DEFINITELY "stream of confusion."

FWIW, I'm on the final leg. When wifey's hard drive starting tossing S.M.A.R.T. errors, which was only a couple of weeks ago, I made a backup of her stuff to her other hard drive (the one that WASN'T throwing errors). What she had on her system was too big for an 8 Gb thumb drive. (Later, found out it was 9 Gb.)

We got a larger thumb drive, but her machine died too soon for that to be useful. When I Decommed her machine I took out the hard drives, kept the secondary. This morning after some much-needed sleep, I swapped out my second drive for HER second drive and use MY aging PC to allow me to copy her files to a 16 Gb thumb drive. They should fit OK. By tonight I'll have her up and running with at most a couple of weeks data loss. Considering that the machine was bought in Fall 2003, that's about 2 weeks out of 700, which is maybe... 0.3%?

She owes me BIG time for this one.