MS Outlook Woes - Contacts won’t load

Posted by admin on March 1, 2009 under 2-User Tips, 3-Tech Tips |

I’ve recently had the pleasure of upgrading from Outlook 2003 to 2007, as well as assisting a client do the same. Neither endeavors went as easily as I would have liked!

On my installation, Outlook lost the ability to pull contacts into an email. If I opened a new email and clicked the TO button, nothing came up. Yet if I went into my contacts, they were all there. I did a search on this and found a lot a lot of similar woes. Most of the answers pointed to this Microsoft Bulletin:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287563/en-us
This document explains how to go into account settings and add an address book to Outlook, then go to your Contact List “Folder Properties” and click a checkbox to “Show this folder as an e-mail address book .”

Easy enough, except the first step didn’t let me make any changes, and in the second step the checkbox was grayed out.

Now the problem became really interesting - I searched on various phrases about the checkbox being grayed out and found many similar problems and no answers. After a lot of searching, and combing pages of results, I found this Microsoft Bulletin:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/829918/en-us

In short, there is no way to fix this problem, except to create a new user profile in Outlook. This bulletin explains how to create a new profile in Outlook. It was a relatively easy solution, except Outlook 2007 doesn’t let you export and import mail accounts so I had to manually re-enter my 6 or so email accounts. So apparently there is no real solution to this problem - recreating the profile is a nice way of saying “Start Over”.