Outlook Crashes Everytime while Opening

This is Office Pro 2003 running on Windows XP SP3. I installed it couple of months ago and everything was working fine so far. Suddenly don’t know what went wrong now my Outlook started crashing everytime I try to launch. When I start it in Safe Mode it works fine, but crashes immediately when launched in normal mode.

As troubleshooting I tried installing all latest Windows Updates, tried re-installing only Outlook, later re-installed Entire Office suite but still the problem remains. When I checked the Event Viewer I found this entry:

“Faulting application outlook.exe, version 11.0.8010.0, stamp 43d16d53, faulting module mso.dll, version 11.0.6568.0, stamp 42e18ef6, debug? 0, fault address 0x0005cd6d.”

Any suggestions please?

If it is working fine in Safe Mode but giving problem in Normal mode then its very obvious that there is some add-in which is crashing the application. Hence you will need to check which plugin is it. Better try disabling one by one add-ins. Apart from this also make sure Outlook or its plugins are allowed through the firewall if you are using any third party firewall.

I had a similar problem where Outlook 2003 SP3 kept crashing at start up. I fixed it by renaming the file:
C:\Documents and Settings\%user%\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outcmd.dat

to

C:\Documents and Settings\%user%\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outcmd.dat.old

where %user% is the user name.

After that Outlook was able to start just fine. Not sure what caused the problem though.

It works with outlook 2007 too.

I found that by following a COMBINATION of :

1. removing the outcmd.dat as explained in this thread.
2. removing my kaspersky spam checking add-ons from outlook options
3. removing xobni software from outlook and my pc.

By doing this, i found that the problem id had with outlook 2007 crashing upon startup has been resolved.

Good luck with yours - hope this works for you.

Just as a general FYI: This fix works for Outlook 2007 as well.