Manage Misbehaving Add-Ins in Outlook 2007

When new Outlook, or Office for that matter is released, they are generally made to be backward compatible with previous versions. Due to various reasons, some third party add-ins that functioned perfectly in Outlook 2003 might not work or even misbehave and cause problems loading Outlook 2007. Here is how you can disconnect a misbehaving Add-in:

1. If an add-in causes Outlook to crash when Outlook is loading, Outlook 2007 should prompt you to disable the add-in. If it doesn’t and Outlook crashes then use the command line outlook.exe /safe to start Outlook in safe mode.
2. Select the Tools menu, and then Trust Center.
3. Click on the Add-ins tab (on left vertical tab pane), and then click the Go button at the bottom of the page.
4. Find that add-in and uncheck the box next to the add-in to disable it and click OK.

When you get a proper patch that makes your third party add-in compatible with Outlook 2007 and you want to enable it, you can follow the above procedure and just check the listed add-ins that you want to enable. While you can access this from the Trust Center via the Add-ins tab, the easiest way in Outlook is to select the Help menu, then Disabled Items. Find the add-in on the list of disabled items, select it, and click the Enable button to enable the add-in again.

If Outlook believes the add-in is misbehaving it can automatically disable it. There are some add-ins that are disabled immediately when Outlook is installed. In all cases, enable an add-in again only if you are sure that it will not cause any problems in Outlook.

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