Over the years, I have had many customers call me because they are frustrated with Microsoft Outlook. Common symptoms include:

• Outlook freezes when sending email or receiving email;
• Outlook will not open at all;
• Outlook will open once, but if you close it, it will not open again until you restart your computer;
• Outlook randomly crashes or freezes;
• Etc.

Quite often (but not always) these problems are due to one or more Outlook Plugins and Add-Ins that have become unstable.

Fix Microsoft Outlook - Disable Unstable Plugins and Add-Ins

How do you know if you even have any Outlook Add-Ins or Plugins? How can you turn them off if you do?

Simple: Use the free Office Add-Ins Manager from NirSoft.

This powerful little utility will help you manage all of your Microsoft Office Add-Ins and Plugins. If you suspect you don't need any add-ins running at all, disable all of them--though you should make note of the original settings in case you want to restore them.

To disable an Outlook Add-In:

• Close Microsoft Outlook if it is running.
• For added assurance, restart your computer.
• Run the Office Add-Ins Manager to get a list of Office Add-Ins.
• Click the heading of the Software column to sort by software.
• Find the Outlook entries in the Software column, and make note their initial Start Mode values.
• Right-Click on each Outlook entry, click on "Change Start Mode", then click on "Disabled".

If it was an Add-In or Plugin crashing your Microsoft Outlook software, then your problem should now be solved! If this did not help, you may wish to restore the Add-Ins to their initial Start Mode states.

Microsoft Outlook Software Links