outlook 2007 reading pane greyed out

Last month I bought new Dell D830 laptop which came pre-installed with Office 2007 trial. Two days ago I bought a full version of Office 2007 Small Business edition and installed the same on my laptop after removing the trail. Installation went fine without any problem but when I open Outlook (since first launch) its reading pane use to be grayed out ant not clickable. Even running the Office Diagnostics is ableto fix it.

Apart from this, about 4 to 5 times a day my Outlook crashes and prompts to be restarted. Can anyone please tell me what could be the problem? Thank you in advance.

Did you tried running Outlook in safe mode? Does the reading pane works fine or is it still grayed out? If it works fine then you will need to disable some add-ins. I’m sure there might be some addins creating the problem.

I have been facing this exact problem earlier with outllok 2007. After lots of research I found that first you need to start Outlook in Safe Mode, Once launched let it be opened for couple of minutes. Then close it and start it again in normal mode. The problem will be fixed. To launch it in safe mode, run this command in RUN:

outlook.exe /safe

Hope it helps.

Thank you very much for the help unidentified. As you said, I started Outlook in safe mode, reading pane was fine, closed it and started in Normal mode. Fortunately so far reading pane is not turned in to gray. It is still working.

Thank you very much for the help.

I started Outlook in safe mode and I still cannot bring up my preview pane