Outlook 2007 hangs when Calendar tab is clicked

[Johanvo]

I am using Windows Vista on a Sony Notebook with Outlook 2007 SP1 connected to exchange server 2003. I had a problem that my outlook worked fine except for one thing: it hanged whenever I clicked on the calendar tab. I then had to restart my outlook, there was no other way out of the problem.

Investigating the problem it occurred that when I clicked on individual dates on the calendar displayed on the front screen, the calendar did display EXCEPT when TODAY was selected. Any other date worked fine except the current date. This was true for any date, in such a manner that today would freeze up, but on the next day the same date (which was then yesterday) did not hang anymore.

After a long while I accidentally found the solution to this problem. You will notice when the calendar is displayed in the default calendar view (month/week/day with preview), at the bottom of the screen there is also a part where today's tasks are displayed. I edited the view and removed the display of tasks in the calendar screen, and suddenly the calendar did not hang anymore. It appeared that some item amongst the tasks caused the crash, but when the tasks are displayed in the task tab, Outlook does not hang.

So, if your Outlook 2007 hangs whenever you click on the calendar tab, edit your calendar view and disable the display of the task/todo list in the calendar view. This might solve your problem like it did for me.

 

[fabienm]

Hi all,

Johanvo, thanks for your post.

After installation of Office 2007 SP1, I noticed Outlook 2007 was hanging when navigating from Calendar to Mail panes. I regularly had to end Outlook with the Task Manager.

Until now, I had the " To-Do Bar" displayed with the Mail pane. Removed it. I can confirm that navigation between the two panes is now smoother.

-
Fabien M.

Desktop | Infrastructure | Security Solutions

Avanade

http://www.avanade.com

 

[sheastewart]

Fabienm wrote:

Hi all,

Johanvo, thanks for your post.

After installation of Office 2007 SP1, I noticed Outlook 2007 was hanging when navigating from Calendar to Mail panes. I regularly had to end Outlook with the Task Manager.

Until now, I had the " To-Do Bar" displayed with the Mail pane. Removed it. I can confirm that navigation between the two panes is now smoother.

-
Fabien M.

Desktop | Infrastructure | Security Solutions

Avanade

http://www.avanade.com

Thanks for posting your message. I was having similar issues and could not leave Outlook open for more than 30 mins without either an application or even system crash. Thanks to your advice, I have removed the 'To-Do-Bar' from all screens and have been running stable for over 8 hours.

Much Appreciated!

 

[sheastewart]

As a note to anyone having the same issue, this was not completely solved with the To-Do bar issue. I have found the crash issue will still arise as long as I am accessing another users calendar. Remove the shared calendar, and outlook is stable. I haven't yet found a workaround for this and it is necessary to use shared calendars.

 

[AJF123]

Hi - We are having a similar problem in my office. We have Windows XP on all of our client machines, and run Small Business Server and Miscrosoft Exchange Server 2003. All user machines (except one) run Outlook 2007 with Biz Contact Mgr along with Office 2007 Ultimate. We share calendars, and are heavy users of BCM. Everything was working fine except a constant error about the windows indexing function not working when we opened Outlook.

One of our users decided to " Fix" this error by installing the recommended windows updates. One of the updates was the SP1 update, which evidently has a fix for the windows search /indexing feature. However, unfortunately, although the indexing error disappeared (yipee), the update seemed to cause another unexpected and much more serious error. Whenever the user tried to open the outlook calendar using the tab, the calendar would " hang" and outlook would crash. Oddly, the users calendar could still be accessed by other users through the shared calendar function, and the user could still access their calendar through the remote web workplace and webmail...just not through outlook.

We felt the problem was somehow related to the SP1 update and the now corrected indexing feature, but windows would not allow us to uninstall the SP1 update. So we spent many hours trying different suggested fixes in blogs (including removing recurring calendar items, uninstalling updates, and trying to restore software with various .exe files), uninstalling and reinstalling office 2007, and trying to fix the software through other traditional methods. After talking with MS support and beign transferred to 3 different MS tech groups, we finally determined the only solution was to do a system restore, and reinstall everything back to the way it was before the updates. So, now the calendar works again, but we have no updates. If anyone has an idea about how we can install the updates and NOT blow out the calendar function please advise. We have not tried the psuedo fix you mention above related to the to-do list, but if we get brave enough to re-install SP1, and have the same issue, we may give it a go!

 

[Surya Nanduri]

Removing the Tasks list in the calendar view resolved the problem for me. Thanks Johanvo!

 

[a$49.99 Broke]

I just spent $49.00 to pay for support on Microsoft to get the hanging and freezing problem fixed. While I hate the idea that I had to pay for it (since Gateway Tech Support was clueless on this problem), I had not choice but to pay the fee. Nevertheless, after trying everything in the book, they fixed the problem.

Let me tell you what DID NOT work so that I can save you the agony of spending hours.

* Re-loading my Outlook 2007 did not work.

* Re-loading Office Vista did not work.

* Re-loading Vista Operating System did not work.

* Installing and re-installing updates did not work.

* Removing Adobe Acrobat did not work.

* Reducing the size of the .pst file did not work.

Here are the steps that I did to stop the freezing and hanging so that you don't have to pay the $49.99 fee that I had to pay.

- In Outlook, go to " Tools" ;

- Select " Trust Center"

- In Trust Center, click " Add-Ins"

- At The Bottom Make Sure That " Com Add-Ins" is selected and Click " Go"

- You must uncheck, as many of the add-ins as possible. There may be some Microsoft programs that it will not let you uncheck. That's OK. Uncheck as many items as possible.

- After you are done, you must close Outlook 2007 completely and restart Outlook.

When I did this, the hanging and freezing stopped and my computer also stopped crashing. You should note that if you are using add-ins like Plaxo, MagicJack, or similar applications, these programs may re-appear in your Outlook the next time you boot your computer unless you remove them completely. So if the problem appears fixed, but it re-appears, you may want to check to be sure that some of those add-in's didn't re-appear in Outlook 2007.

I hope this is helpful to you.

 

[Empedocles]

Hi Johanvo,

thanks a million! Your solution worked for me. I had tried a lot of suggestions beforehand such as running scanpst on my *.pst files, running scanost on my *.ost files, starting outlook with the /cleanviews switch, repairing Office 2007, but none of these worked.

 

[Albert Widjaja]

Great, this post should be the Sticky post of this forum then

 

[Adam3of7]

Unfortunately in spite of everything above, I cannot clear this problem - running XP and Office 2007 with SP1 - any attempt to display calendar content hangs Outlook. This behaviour commenced after installing the office SP1. I have also applied outlook2007-kb952142 fix with no improvement.

How do I remove to do items if I cannot access the calendar view?

 

[a4brooks]

Tried everything - didn't work. I am running XP and Office 2003. I can see the calendar (day, week, month) but cannot access a day to input an event or change an existing event in the calendar. The blue bar will highlight the day but nothing happens when I double click on the bar or I double click on an existing event. I have 2 home computers (1 rarely runs) on a single router. I get no error message. Please help. Thanks

 

[LBU]

I had a hard drive that was corrupted so I had to reinstall everything, but I had everything backed up. I had the same problem with Vista (Ultimate 64) and Outlook 2007 SP1. I had imported in my work e-mail PST and the calendar problem was fixed when I imported in my archive and personal folder PSTs. I think the problem was that I had followups tagged on e-mails. The e-mails were imported in, but since the personal folder hadn't been imported yet, it must have been looking for the reminders in such in a location that didn't exist yet. I did un-install business contact manager, but might reinstall as it doesn't look to have been the problem. Hope this can help someone else!

 

[xMarcus]

outlook /resettodobar

outlook /cleanprofile

outlook /cleanviews

outlook /cleandmrecords

Running all these has help out our users. The cleanviews switch deletes any custom views the user has created. I think most of these issues can be traced back to mailboxes which were once accessed using outlook 2000/2003 and are now access by outlook 2007. Upgrade from office 2003 to 2007 on the same computer doesn't help the situation either.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP012185891033.aspx

has a lot of command line switches you can try. Many of them delete customizations users have made and clean out any settings, so be sure the user won't miss their customizations (like /cleancategories, that one bit me in the ***)

Marcus

 

[meperson]

Thanks Johanvo

Removing the Tasks list in the calendar view also resolved the problem for me - I had tried so many things suggested in other forums to resolve the problem, but every time I clicked on 'calendar', Outlook would freeze. It was incredibly frustrating. Even starting it using /cleanviews didn't work for me.

Anyway, this totally solved the problem and was pretty painless, so thank you very much indeed for bothering to post.

 

[SUN EYE]

The problem worked for me too. Unfortunately, you did not explain how to get into calendar to be able to not have the task and to-do list show up. Well, after reading your post CAREFULLY, I was in my Task and click on yesterdays date in the small calendar on the To-Do bar and it opened calendar without any problems. I then continued on disabling the task/todo list. Now, calendar opens without any problems. THANK YOU!!!

 

[pcResolver]

Thanks, Johanvo.

This was just what I needed! I've been trying for a week to fix this.

For me, I had to choose a date before today. Today or after caused Outlook to hang.

 

[n2326e]

Starting Outlook with the /resettodobar flag fixed my problem. I recall recently marking some of my tasks as complete. This must have messed up the the to do bar.

Thanks for the suggestion Marcus55!

 

[Tim Coveney]

Just adding my 'me too' comment to this, just in case anybody from the Outlook team @ Microsoft reads this and wants to fix it for real, as I quite liked having my daily task list available in calendar view.

Thanks Johanvo for the workaround - this was starting to really bug me as I'd already tried scanost, created a brand new profile (and hence OST) and the other troubleshooting like removing add-ins, /cleanfreebusy, /resettodobar etc etc.

Just to be clear to others who come across the thread after seeing the problem, the way to implement the workaround is to click on a date previous to 'today' in the small calendar in the 'To do' pane, which allows access to your calendar. Then click 'View', 'Daily Task List' and 'Off' - then your calendar wil behave normally again.

 

[KlausRM]

Also a 'me too' from here.

Wish I was experiencing a better reaction in solving this problem.



Klaus

 

[Geekus Australis]

Thank you Marcus.

This problem was was driving me to computer rage!

Using the the 4 switches you mentioned solved the problem for me.

The no preview switch, and shortcut creation for it, referred to in the link you provided is also very handy.

You're a scholar and a champion!

Whopper