MS Office Outlook error

I am the IT department for our company so the director of sales asked me to help him with this even though I am really a developer. He is trying to open Outlook (2007) this morning and is getting an error to this effect:

Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. cannot open the Outlook window. Invalid XML, the view cannot be loaded

So I googled that error, and one thing I found said to do a Start->Run, then open Outlook by running outlook.exe /safe. However, this returned the same error message. Another thing I found was to go to installed programs and click repair. I am just nervous because this is our director of sales and he has very important email stored and I wouldn't want to do anything that would cause him to lose it all. I will keep googling but I know I can trust this forum for sound advice so please help if you can. Thanks.

Have you tried to reset outlook's navigation pane? Make sure all office applications are closed then go to Start > Run, type in "outlook.exe /resetnavpane" and hit OK.

How are your emails stored? If they are on an exchange server then whatever you do with the Outlook installation will not affect emails in his mailbox. If its a POP3 server though and the Outlook settings are not set to leave a copy of messages on the server then the only copy of the email will be on his machine - if its just storing it in a PST file in the default location then you can just copy this PST file before you do anything so that you know you have a backup of his emails. It should be in here by default: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME_HERE\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook (and files in there with a .pst extension could potentially be where his emails are being stored but this only applies if he is using POP3 and not an Exchange server)

To be honest doing a repair installation (or complete reinstallation) is the first thing I would try as that is quite likely to fix it.

The problem is that one of Outlooks Views is corrupt or damaged. the View object is an xml defined object that presents the layout of columns in ,for example, the Inbox. You are essentially customizing a View when you modify it via the GUI by arranging the columns, adding/removing, etc.

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So I googled that error, and one thing I found said to do a Start->Run, then open Outlook by running outlook.exe /safe.

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Try restarting outlook with the /resetnavpane switch

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Originally Posted by koolsid

Try restarting outlook with the /resetnavpane switch

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Post #2 ;)

We havent heard back yet, the suspense is killing us. :D

OMG, I missed that :lol: