folder contents disappear from Favorite Folder

[Guest]

I had a folder with 2000+ messages in it which I had placed in my Favorite
Folder pane. I was working on a reply to one of the messages in this folder
(using MS Word as the editor). I got the following error message in MS Word:
"A fatal error has occurred in Outlook. The data in your envelope has been
lost, but your document is still available". Sure enough the reply being
edited was not affected, and I subsequently sent it. But when I reopened
Outlook, all the pesonal folders I had dragged into the Favorite Folders pane
were no longer there. And when I navigated to this particular folder in the
folder list, although the folder was still there, it was EMPTY. I
immediately went to the deleted folder, but found nothing there. I did not
authorize any deletions, permanent or otherwise. Any ideas as to what
happened and what I could do about it?
PS: What is an "envelope" anyway? I cannot find it in the Word or the
Outlook knowledge bases.

Thanks!

Ben

 

[Diane Poremsky]

an "envelope" is the email address etc added to an email - in this case,
those fields are added to the word document so it can be sent as email.
Usually when outlook crashes the address and subject information is lost and
you need to reenter it before sending.

when outlook crashes it creates a new navigation pane field using the
defaults. It's somewhat unusual for them to disappear if Outlook closed
properly previously and they were retained. If you add them to the favorites
list then crash outlook, they will disappear because the file isn't saved
until you close outlook.

did you try resetting the view on the folder? reopening outlook? rebooting?
did you run scanpst on the personal folders?