I was overjoyed to see the email announcing the public release of the Office 2010 Beta. After using the Technical Preview for some months I was anxious for the Beta. Reading through the Release notes advised to uninstall all previous versions of Office 2010 prior to installing the Beta. I did as instructed and using the Control Panel uninstalled the Technical Preview. Now I was ready to go… or maybe not. I previously used the 64Bit version of Office 2010 but wanted to check out the 32 Bit Beta release. Shortly after launching the installed I received an error that all previous editions of 2010 must be uninstalled. I thought I had already done that! Not so quick there genius… upon closer inspection I failed to uninstall the MS Outlook Connection 64Bit for Office 2010. Problem solved… right… Not so much.
The Beta did install, taking a grand total of 11 minutes from start to finish. I opened Word and entered the product key, then activated the product. This was somewhat confusing because you are presented with the same install dialog box, but after clicking the install button, all products were updated and activated. I closed Word and then reopened it… Presto! Word works, then Excel, then PowerPoint, then Outlook….. Outlook fails to open with a strange message. “Microsoft Outlook cannot start. The Outlook window cannot be opened.” Nothing else. After a quick check of the Event Log, things go from bad to worse. Nothing… Nothing.. Nothing in the Event Logs. So to Bing I go with my Error Message. After a quick scan through some of the results, it appears that I may need to use the Windows Installer Cleanup to perform some maintenance. I uninstalled Office 2010, then used the Cleanup tool to ensure that Office 2010 was vanquished from my PC.
Another install and activation later, I get a new Error Message. Yahoo! This error message contains an event id… Now I’m getting somewhere! The Error Message was “Error 1935. An error occurred during the installation of assembly component {10CD20D2-733E-4174-9D02-2C6C26163DA5}.” After a quick Knowledgebase Search it appears that my .Net Framework had a corrupted assembly. Easy enough to fix that. Open the Control Panel, Installed Programs and then Repair! A short while later my .Net Framework is repaired. Alas I’m ready to get into Outlook. Not so fast there hombre… Let’s go back to the previous error message about that darn Outlook window that cannot be opened. (I’m not overly frustrated yet as I see this as a true test of my troubleshooting skills. I mean, after all I am a Clubhouse Member and a true diehard techno freak!!!!)
Back to the Bing Search, lets dive a little deeper. I find two items of interest. First, a thread over on the Microsoft Answers forum. It offered several suggestions and a couple of possible fixes. I began to try these one at a time…
Finally, Eureka!!!! OLfix is a freeware tool that repairs Outlook profiles and much more. As I understand it, the error I’m experiencing stems from the registry settings for my previous Outlook profile. OLfix provides a way to view, analyze, repair and remove unused services from Outlook. I used the first option in the shot below; Repair profiles.
http://www.olfolders.de/Lang/English/OLfix/
After selecting the Repair Profiles option above, I selected Unused Services and clicked DELETE!
Guess what… Clicking on the 
Outlook icon now produces a GREAT result. I’m also noting with great satisfaction that the FILE tab is back and takes you to the Backstage View.
Life is good now. My installation works and I’ve learned a little something for future encounters. One lesson to take away from this that we are all warned of when using beta’s is that when moving from one version to another, many difficulties can be encountered and the tester must be prepared to handle all that comes their way. And always, I mean always use the :) or the :( to send your feedback to the folks over at Microsoft.
Great job with taking our feedback and bug info from the Technical Preview and making it reality with the Beta build. I’ll continue to use it daily at work and home to see what its got to offer under the hood.
