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Xobni beta - Outlook Mail indexer and organizer

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Carol Haynes:
Does Shutdown Add-In actually do it gracefully? If so how? I tried it but I wasn't sure what it was actually doing to acheive the result.

I don't want to get into using a utility that just kills processes. It wouldn't matter too much with Word because so long as you save your documents you are fine, and Word has built in protection for terminating unexpectedly. However Outlook has no such protection and closing it by force often causes Outlloks data files to become error prone.

If Shutdown Add-In actually acheives this in a sensible, rather than brutal, way then I will probably install it permanently but I think the actual long term solution is to find out why Outlook isn't closing properly and get it fixed.

The other part of the solution is reularly backing up your Outlook data (and that includes all aspects of Outlook not just the PST file!).

Darwin:
Shutdown Add-in claims to do both... sort of. Its author states that it hooks

into events triggered by Outlook and invoking a series of commands to help Outlook exit. After a certain timeout period, if Outlook still doesn't exit, then the process is forcefully exited
--- End quote ---

Carol, you've forced me to look at something I hadn't given much thought to before. My reading of the above is that this is simply automating what Knockout does and what I do with TaskManager - looks for Outlook's process running and kills it if Outlook has been closed. I'm not sure how the events are hooked into and what commands are invoked to "help" Outlook close, but that is the functionality that I've always associated with Shutdown Add-in. I bought it years ago because I grew tired of finding six or more Outlook processes hogging my processor and RAM (with 128MB at the time) and killing them with TM... Realistically, if all Shutdown Add-in is doing is forcing Outlook to close, this might actually be causing PST corruption as I've no idea how often it's simply terminated Outlook over the years.

Bother.

Carol Haynes:
Hmmm - I think I have found the culprit on my system.

I have iTunes installed and for some reason it installs a COM addin in Outlook. With that disabled Outlook exits correctly.

God alone know why Apple have to put a plugin into Outlook and the problem is that every time iTunes gets updated I will have to remember to disable the plugin as updates re-enable it.

Note from past experience it is not worth removing the plugin (or any of the service Apple insist on installing) as the next time you run iTunes it detects that the installation has changed and puts them back again. Disabling the Outlook plugin, however, seems to work fine.

Darwin:
Note - scour your harddrive for and Apple installers folder (I'm pretty sure it's under Documents and User Settings somewhere) and delete whatever you find... That should solve iTunes re-installing add-ins? I've been iTunes free for the last six months or so and love it, so I can't be sure that this will work anymore, but it's worth a shot. I really wish there were some other way to play iTunes files (ie without using iTunes).

Darwin:
PS Thanks for the pointer, though, Carol. I took a look at the add-ins loading themselves into Outlook and was able to disable ( ;D) four that I never use. Hopefully, this will have a positive effect on things...

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