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Outlook reminders window is blank

Working with Outlook 2003 on an XP Pro Machine
Outlook is standalone, no Exchange Server

The user has many reminders set on the calendar. Many of they are yet to happen, many of them are pass due... yet the reminders window is blank.

So far I have run scanpst.exe and Outlook.exe /clean reminders. I still see the reminders on the calendar... but not in the reminders window.

Suggestions welcome.

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war1

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Tomster2

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Went throught the entire list. Checking at each step.

No joy. Even after the reinstall. (And before the reinstall, I deleted the existing profiles to assure a clean start and renamed the outllib.dll).

From this I am concluding the problem resides in the pst file itself... not any of the surrounding environmental issues... but scanpst did not resolve it... it reports

"errors were found"
Folders found in this file: 155
Items found in this file: 6055

The details of the scanpst run only says " Internal errors were found in this file. They must be repaired for this file to work correctly."

So I hit "Repair" and after 3-5 minutes it says "repair complete".

If I immediately (without opening Outlook) rerun scanpst again... it reports:

No errors were found in this file
Folders found in this file: 155
Items found in this file: 6055

I reopen Outlook, and within a few seconds... it again says:

"There was a problem reading one or more of your reminders. Some reminders may not appear. Cannot locate recurrence information for this appointment." When I go to View | Reminders Window - it is empty and advises "there are no reminders to show."

Reran scanpst... and it told me there were no errors in these files (only error messages, I guess)

So at that point, I went through a procedure I went through before. I opened each of the recurring reminders... and saved and closed... and found 1 that gave an error message "cannot locate recurrence information". I made a note of it and deleted it. Found four others that I could open and save... but which showed an end recurrance of 2045 rather than "No End". Made a note of these and deleted them.

Note that I had weeded these out before I did the uninstall/reinstall/repair with no satisfaction (or joy). This time, however, I immediately closed Outlook and ran Scanpst again.

This time it again reported no errors... but when I opened Outlook, the reminder window popped up and showed the reminders. Viola! It works! and this stuff is great... when it works!

I can only surmise the combination of deleting the questionable entries and running scanpst again did it.

war1, thanks for your comments. You get the points as a thanks for contributing.

Add the open and close recurring entries to your troubleshooting list. I saw it on another thread at EE, tried it and dismissed it because it did not make a difference the first I did it. The second time was the charm... but who knows, I did a lot between the first and second time I did it. But next time, that is where I am starting for this particular error message.

Tomster2