Article created August 4th 2009 at 14:24 
Description
When using Outlook 2007, you are able to open the program and open mails but you are not able to close the windows again using the X or Alt+F4.
Symptoms
- You can open Outlook without any problems or errors.
- You can send or receive mail without any problems
- You can open a mail in it’s own windows but cannot close it again
- You can only exit Outlook by ending the outlook.exe process in Task Manager
Explanation
This problem has being known to occur because there is actually a tiny window open in the background belonging to Microsoft Outlook 2007 that you can’t see on the screen or easily switch to. This is actually the window that requests the user to enter their initials like the one below. This window usually appears when you run any Microsoft Office programme for the first time and this is exactly how we’re going to fix the problem. Read on below for the solution.
Solution
Step 1 - Close Outlook, Open Word or Excel, Enter Initials, Open Outlook
- If the Outlook window is still open then you’ll have to close it using Task Manager.
- Right click on your Windows Taskbar and click ‘Task Manager’
- Click the ‘Processes’ tab
- In the list, locate Outlook.exe, highlight it with your mouse and click the End Process button
- Click Yes to the Task Manager Warning
- Now open Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel
- On opening one of these programs you should be presented with a dialog similar to the one above requesting you to enter your initials and name.
- Enter these and click OK.
- Now exit Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel depending on which one you opened
- Open Microsoft Outlook again.
- You should now have no problems closing Outlook windows.
Please Comment! Add your comments below if this solved your issue or if you found that your setup was different.Please let us know your versions and what exactly you were doing when you had this issue so that we can update this solution and help others with the same problem.
Tags: Microsoft Outlook, Solutions, Vista, Windows, xp
Created in MS Outlook, Solutions
