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Robert HolmesFlag for United States of America

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Outlook 2003 will not open address book

I am working on with 5 workstations all running windows xp pro sp3 and 1 server running sbs 2003, one workstation is suddenly unable to open the address book in office 2003. When opening a new message window everything looks fine, clicking on the TO: button or the address book button will cause the "unable to complete operation. A fatal error has occured in outlook" message to show up. Outllook will generally remain running and useable but will sometimes just hang. I have already re-installed office, for another issue, excel was not opening but rather trying to install when launched, but thats already taken care of. I have also attempted using the detec and repair option and it trys to install office, anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?
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Are they using PST files for contacts, messages, etc?
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war1
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I have tried a few things myself and am now able to open the normal outlook addressbook, however it has become appearant that ACT!2009 is part of the problem, I removed the act addressbook and the outlook address book, added them back and now the outlook addressbook works, however the act one had around 40000 contact and the number may be causing the problem, I'm not entirely sure but I imagine there is a limit on how many entries are in an outlook address book. Anyway it appears that removing and readding the address book fixes the crash with one, but not the other. I'll give a few of these suggestions a try still, office is acting very strange on this system. ....And I do belive they are using .pst files, the install is completly default from an office 2003 professional disk.
Ok, after you tried the sugestions, let us know how they work.
It seems that our application ACT! is causing the problem, I've been a bit busy and havent had a chance to post on here until now, but after removing the ACT! address book from outlook, outlook works, I also had to remove the standard outlook address book and re create it but everything seems to be working now, thanks for the suggestions.
Technician, glad you found the external program causing the problem.  It could be an ACT addon in Outlook or ACT needs an update.
Thank you this resolved the issue. repair utility...