How to fix “Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Unable to open Outlook window” error?

Published by Jacob Martin on April 2, 2015

Outlook is an amazing email application, with which you can manage all your emails, contacts tasks, meetings, to do list and etc. All the items of outlook are saved in separate file named PST (personal storage table) file. So if any corruption issue arises in PST files then all the stored data gets inaccessible and while you trying to open it up you will encounter with the following error:

“Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Unable to open Outlook window”

What is the reason for “Unable to start Microsoft Outlook” error

This problem is generally arises when you click Outlook’s icon, and is hanging for a while, at that time you will get the “Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook” error.

The main cause of this issue is the corruption of the Navigation Pane settings file – profilename.xml, where “profilename” is the name of your Outlook profile. A good indication that the file is corrupted is when its size is 0 KB. No one can tell you what is exact reason of the problem, but all versions of Microsoft Outlook from 2003 to the newest Outlook 2013 may get affected with this.

If you are running Outlook in the compatibility mode or if the Outlook data file was deleted or damaged due to incorrect uninstallation or reinstallation of Outlook or if you are using a profile created in an older Outlook version, all these can make your outlook file corrupted.

Whatever the reason may be the result is that you can’t open the Outlook window because of this error.

You will encounter different message depending on which Outlook version you use.

Outlook 2003: “Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Unable to open the Outlook window. Invalid XML, the view cannot be loaded.“

Outlook 2007: “Cannot open your default e-mail folders. The information store could not be opened.“

Outlook 2010: “Microsoft Outlook has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.“

Manual methods to solve this issue:

After knowing the causes problems on Outlook start up, try to fix out this problem as soon as possible. To do this you can follow these steps:

– Recover the configuration file of the Navigation Pane

– Erase the Navigation pane file settings

– Repair the Outlook data files (.pst and .ost)

– Turn off the Outlook Compatibility mode

– Generate a new profile on Outlook

– Open Outlook in Secure Mode

How to Fix “Unable to open Outlook window” error?

If your outlook file gets corrupted in spite of all precautions then the only option to access and restore the data stored in it. MS Outlook has some inbuilt Scanpst.exe Tool with it to fix minor corruption PST corruption issues. BUT if still you are unable to fix this error issue occurred in the PST file. To solve this error issue you can take help of third party repair tool like Outlook PST Repair software.

Outlook PST Repair tool is best suited and most trusted repair programs to fix severely corrupt / damaged PST file due to any reason. During this task of repairing the PST file, it automatically recovers all the deleted emails, contacts and other elements from it. This is especially designed to repair and restore any kind of broken or damaged PST and OST files. It completely scan your corrupt PST file thoroughly and repairs it like a  new healthy PST file from which you can easily restore all your important items like appointments, notes, calendar items, mails, attachments, contact details,  etc. with this you can also repair highly encrypted and password protected PST files.

Steps for using outlook repair tool are shown below:

Step 1: You need to download, install and run outlook PST repair tool. Then click on ‘select outlook file’ to choose the PST file where you want to work or you may find the specific PST file also.

Step 2: Press “start” to begin scanning, once you have selected the PST file.

Step 3: After completion of scanning, all recovered mailbox folders and other data appear on the left side of the window. You can select the files of your choice from those.

Step 4: After selecting items of your choice you can press “save recovered file” to recover the files on your PC.

Step 5: When your files are saved, a dialogue box appears that confirms that files are saved and also shows the “recovered file size” and “destination path”.

By going through all the above procedures, you can fix your outlook out of memory error successfully.

469 Total Views 3 Views Today