Occasionally, no vertical scroll bar in navigation pane in Outlook 2013

[TonyC]

I've been using Outlook 2013 for only a few weeks. Yesterday and today, I experienced a "small" problem for the first time. After booting up my Windows 7 system and starting Outlook 2013 for the first time in the session, the navigation pane (left pane) appeared without a vertical scroll bar. Moving the mouse over the pane didn't "unhide" the scroll bar and the highlighting of the Inbox folder name stretched across the whole width of the navigation pane. As a result, I could see only a subset of my folders. In File > Options > Advanced > Display, "Disable hardware graphics acceleration" is ticked/checked.

Fortunately, on both occasions, when I closed Outlook 2013 and started it again, the situation was rectified - the navigation pane once again had its vertical scroll bar.

Is this a known glitch? Has anyone else ever experienced it? Is there a fix?

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Are all updates installed? This sounds like a problem from last fall, but it was fixed - although the problem last fall was not helped by a restart. It's possible that it's related to a video card driver since it's a display issue. Do you know which video card you have installed?

Screenshot of the problem from last fall is here: http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/2013/outlook-2013-update-fix-missing-navigation-pane/

 

[TonyC]

Thank you for the reply.

Yes, all updates are installed - I'm on release level 15.0.4605.1003. I don't think it is the same problem as the one from last fall. In my case, the folder names are listed in the navigation pane. The only thing that is missing is the vertical scroll bar.

I guess it could be the video driver. My PC is only a few months old, so the current driver is quite up-to-date. Nevertheless, I know that there has been a new release of the driver since then, but I just haven't got round to updating the driver on my PC yet. On my PC, the video function is integrated within the motherboard. Is it really going to help to know which motherboard I am using?

I removed Office 2003 completely before installing Office 2013 on the 8 April 2014. Since then, I have recently reinstalled Picture Manager (and ONLY Picture Manager) from Office 2003. But, for such a small executable, it appears to have brought a lot of Office 2003 "baggage" with it in terms of extra folders and files. Considering that the problem appears to have started shortly after I installed Picture Manager 2003, I am left wondering whether the associated "baggage" has introduced any conflicts that are affecting Outlook 2013. I'll probably try uninstalling Picture Manager 2003 and see if it fixes the problem.

The only other changes to my system since installing Office 2013 have been the April Windows 7 updates.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

NVidia cards seem to have the most issues in outlook - but that could be because they are most popular for off the shelf systems.

It's possible that picture manager is affecting it - did you repair 2013 after installing 2003? You should always install office suites in the order they were released to avoid problems.

 

[TonyC]

No, my motherboard has an Intel integrated graphics processor.

No, I haven't done a repair of Office 2013, but thank you for the tip. I did know that different versions of Office suites should be installed in chronological order. I just felt that it might be better to "clear the decks" by uninstalling Office 2003 completely before installing Office 2013. And I didn't think that subsequently re-installing only Picture Manager from Office 2003 would bring nearly 9 MB of "baggage" with it in the Office11 folder.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Only 9 mg? That's not a lot. I'll have to test it on one of my virtual machines and see what all is installed.

 

[TonyC]

Fair point! As an oldie, who still remembers the early days of computing, perhaps I need to recalibrate my expectations? The Picture Manager .exe is just 278KB. Nearly 9MB of Office 2003 infrastruture just seemed (initially at least) to be an awful lot to bring with it.

Regarding the Outlook problem, I'm going to wait and see if any other effects surface before deciding on whether to do a repair. I've noticed that, if I start Outlook 2013 immediately after booting up my Windows 7 system and logging on, the problem does not occur. On the other hand, if I do something else first, like read the latest news using IE, and then start Outlook 2013, the problem might then occur.

Thank you once again for the support.

 

[Forum Admin]

The days of everything in a single exe are long past. Most programs have a few dll or other support files these days and this is likely why other files are installed.

I know from the 'standalone outlook' installs, that there are some weird connections between files. In the standalone installations wordmail features don't work unless you copy winword.exe to the folder where outlook.exe is. However, outlook just needs to see the winword.exe file, it doesn't actually use it. So... you can copy any file and rename it wonword.exe and outlook will enable all of the wordmail features. One person renamed a notepad file - that didn't work here but renaming a copied .dll to winword.exe worked.

it's interesting that using other programs first trigger it - I would expect it if you used picture manager first or if the other programs tried to use picture manager, because it would load the older dlls.

 

[TonyC]

Something strange has happened. This problem disappeared shortly after the last post in this thread, and I am not sure that I did anything at the time to cause it to disappear. However, within the last few days, it has appeared again. When I start Outlook 2013 (part of Office 2013 C2R) for the first time after booting up Windows 7, the navigation pane appears without a vertical scroll bar. As before, this can be corrected by closing Outlook and restarting it. My Office 2013 has not yet been updated to the December 2014 level; I'm still on 15.0.4667.1002.

I've added this post just in case anyone else has experienced the problem in the meantime or might have some additional insight.

 

[TonyC]

Even stranger! The problem has disappeared again, but this time I think I know the reason. For a few days before I wrote the previous post, whenever I logged on to Windows, a message in the system tray/notification area informed me that an update for Adobe Reader was available for download and installation. If I think back now, it was exactly during this time that the vertical scroll bar disappeared from the navigation pane in Outlook.

I have since downloaded and installed the Adobe Reader update, and have subsequently booted up Windows and started Outlook a number of times, and the problem has now disappeared again. The vertical scroll bar in the navigation pane appears every time. I find this absolutely perverse and incredible. How can a notification for an update to Adobe Reader cause the suppression of the vertical scroll bar in the Outlook navigation pane? And why hasn't anyone else experienced this problem? Surely, I'm not the only person using Outlook 2013 on Windows 7 and who receives notifications when logging on to Windows?