I just spent two hours on the phone with the Microsoft support tech, mostly watching him drive the computer with the ailing Outlook installation. Most techs won’t tell you in other than the most general terms what they’re thinking while they’re trying to troubleshoot your computer, and this guy was no exception, but you can learn a lot from just watching, and I did my best to pick up some tricks.
My biggest takeaway was that a publically available Microsoft tool called procmon is really useful. You can find it here. Microsoft describes it as follows:
…an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon, and adds an extensive list of enhancements including rich and non-destructive filtering, comprehensive event properties such session IDs and user names, reliable process information, full thread stacks with integrated symbol support for each operation, simultaneous logging to a file, and much more. Its uniquely powerful features will make Process Monitor a core utility in your system troubleshooting and malware hunting toolkit.
I have to agree. It didn’t allow the tech to fix my system, but it sure provided insights into what Outlook was doing just before the error occurred. Unfortunately, even with some aggressive event filtering, there were just too many entries in the table for the tech to figure out just which one caused the problem.
After two hours, it became apparent to me that the problem was not caused by Outlook. There was some part of the system configuration that was wrong, and Outlook was not coded defensively so that it could deal with whatever was wrong. I don’t know if the tech agreed with me or not, but he took a copy of one of the procmon logs and went off to study it.
After the call, I did a little debugging work myself. I realized that I didn’t know just how library redirection works in Win 7. Is it done in the registry? Or in some shortcuts that Explorer won’t let you see? I never did find out, but in searching for the answer, I happened on this page:
The KB article mentions two registry keys:
- HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UserShellFolder
- HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UserShellFolder
I looked for them on the computer with the problem. I didn’t find them, but I did find
- HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folder\Personal
- HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Explorer\User Shell Folder\Personal
Both values were set to “E:\Documents”. When I first set up the computer, the data drive was E:. Last week, when I was getting Bertha ready to be my main workstation, I changed the drive to D: so that Lightroom would be able to find all my images. I didn’t think anything of it then, but now those two keys were pointing at a drive that wasn’t there.
I changed the keys to “D:\Documents”.
Problem solved.
I have no idea how the keys got set in the first place. I searched the registry for “E:\Documents”, to see what else was hinging around, but got no hits.
Leave a Reply