Disappearing Outlook

I woke up this morning looking forward to getting some work done while everyone else was away to play and ran into an unexpected problem.

Apparently while I was sleeping my outlook window decided to play a game of hide and go seek. It was invisible this morning and I was unable to find it or get it to appear while open even after multiple restarts.

Now, having multiple monitors for years now I know most of the little tricks:

• Turn off one of your monitors so windows re-positions everything to the remaining monitor.
• Make the window active from the task bar, hover and right click on the thumbnail, click ‘Move’ and then hit one of your arrow keys. This locks the cursor to the window while moving and usually brings it back to the screen or at least lets you use the mouse to bring it back. (You have to use the cursor key first after click move rather than the mouse or the mouse will just glide off the window since it’s not locked to it.)
• Restart outlook in safe mode using the /safe command line switch in an attempt to reset it’s position.

Well none of this worked today, and when using the move it actually acted like the window was already on the screen.

After blowing away my profile and recreating even, I dived into the internet trying to find a solution. I finally found this obscure solution on an Italian website:

http://www.folblog.it/risolto-outlook-2010-si-avvia-ma-non-si-apre/

Now, like I said it’s in Italian, but thanks to Chrome and Google’s translate functionality, it was an easy read. For this reason I’m just going to summarize here how to find Outlook when it disappears:

1. Make sure Outlook is completely closed.
2. Right click the start menu or taskbar icon (on the task bar you have to then actually right click the outlook option after right clicking the taskbar icon)
3. Click properties.
4. Modify the setting so the window always starts maximized.
5. Save the setting and start outlook from the shortcut, Outlook will now display properly maximized. If you try to restore it to a window though, it disappears again.
6. While it’s maximized right click the taskbar and select ‘Cascade Windows’
7. You will now see that the Outlook window was cascaded and restored to a normal window.
8. Close Outlook normally.
9. Change the properties of the shortcut back to start as a ‘normal’ window.
10. Problem solved.

I hope this helps someone else, as it was quite the annoyance to me this morning!

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