Form Load Failed - a tale of woe - Sue Mosher can you help?

[Zip]

So I was doing great. I "upgraded" to 2003. I exported my old contact
forms from Outlook 2000. Using Ms Moshers advice, I used formswap, just
as before. Edited the reg file and change the 9.0 to 11.0. Associated
form to folder. And Sweet! It worked. I could see and edit contacts as I
wanted.

But there was something weird.

Whenever I used the Find feature, Outlook showed me the results in a
different form, it didn't seem to be the default, it didn't seem to be
any that I had seen before. And so I got to fiddling and so the trouble
began.

I reinstalled my custom forms, and even though they were recognized by
formswap and the contact folder, the weird standard mystery form always
overides them. I copied the custom forms from the "Outlook Folders"
library to the "Personal Forms Library" to see if I could get ahead on
the priority load but nothing worked. So in exasperation I decided that
I would simply open up the current contact form, and redesign using that
as the basic template and start again. And I was curious to see if the
default was this "new" default, that has a big note section on the
bottom right, or the old original default that has a note section all
the way across the bottom. But.

Disaster! When I to to Tools/Forms/ChooseForms/StandardFormsLibrary and
choose Contact and then Open I get the fatal "FormLoadFailed" I don't
get this on the other forms, they open properly. There is also now a
Contact template (not mine) in "Outlook Folders" but I get the same
error message. Neither of these forms are deletable from the manage
forms dialog box, neither the one you get to by clicking properties
while on the contact folder, nor the one you get to by going to advance
options through the tools menu.

I tried to repair the install based on the disk. The disk repair kept
failing and dialing microsoft to announce its demise.

So I uninstalled and reinstalled outlook. Good news, it installed. Bad
news same exact problem (suspicously lots of the prefs were as they were
before, I wonder how complete the uninstall really is?)

I googled like crazy, and found some weird cache folders
mydocuments/myname/localsettings/application
data/microsoft/forms/frmcache

Also a bunch of suspects at mydocuments/myname/application
data/microsoft/forms/outlook.box and mscomctl2.exd and excel.box

I deleted these, went into Outlook, still couldn't get the contact form
to open (perhaps I should have restarted outlook in between the cache
deletes, but I was nervous about deleting these cache files and then
restarting my machine)

I don't know what to do next. I am running XP, I am a sole proprieter,
just using Hotmail as my mail client. I sync to my palm with intellisync
Rest assured, I have removed intellisync while this fix is going on -
interestingly intellisync announced that it had lost the mappings
between OL and palm, it didn't even go to default, it just couldn't open
the mapping part of the app and guessed the problem was a password but
there isn't one. I back up the files to Yahoo with another intellisync
app (I removed this too). I'm really sorry to bother you, but I fear
that my next step is to take my machine in and have someone just scrub
my whole hard drive and start again, which seems a bit extreme, but not
sure what else to do. Any ideas gratefully receieved. Thank you.
Zip

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Office 2003 SP1 will fix the Find problem. Let's see if it (and clearing the
forms cache) fixes the others, too.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Zip]

Office 2003 SP1 will fix the Find problem. Let's see if it (and
clearing the forms cache) fixes the others, too.


Office 2003 SP1 will fix the Find problem. Let's see if it (and
clearing the forms cache) fixes the others, too.

No luck I'm afraid. I applied SP1. I restarted. I deleted the cache (at
least I think so, I deleted the object called FRMCACHE and OUTLOOK.BOX from
local settings\app data\ms forms and from app data\ms\forms respectively)

I then used form swap with the 11.0 substitution and installed the form
with contacts, just as I had before.

I still get the weird form for displaying and . Plus, when I hit design
this form, I seem to get another type of form displayed, ie not the design
of the form that I am looking at. I've attached two screenshots, one of
this weird generic page, then of the page that gets displayed when you hit
the the Design this Form option.

Also when I go to the standard forms library, and choose the contact form
and hit open, I get the Form Load Failed dialog.

What else might we try? Thanks again for your help and engaging with me, I
really appreciate it.
Cheers