Noiz Waves

Encountered this bug today at work, and it kept me stumped for (too many) hours! The symptoms where that Microsoft Outlook 2003 would freeze when printing an e-mail, showing the unresponsive “Printing…” status dialog in the middle of the screen. Now that Outlook was frozen, any new e-mails that were opened would spawn a new OUTLOOK.EXE process and wait for the busy process to finish.

After terminating the busy process, all the e-mails would open immediately! Major pain in the a-hole. It turns out that Quick View Plus had installed an addon into Outlook which made printing a bit screwy. Disabling it was easy; from Outlooks main window, Tools > Options > Other > Advanced Options > Add-in Manager, and uncheck the Quick View Plus add-in. Save those settings and restart Outlook.

Update: If restarting Outlook doesn’t work, try ending via Task Manager any OUTLOOK.EXE and OLADDIN.EXE processes that may be running, then starting Outlook again.