Outlook 2003 - Preview Pane - deleted item not clearing

[Hoib]

Hello - Have a strange behavior to find out about. Office 2003 and Outlook
2003 on an XP Pro machine with SP3. Has been working fine up to this past
weekend when a power outage brought the machine down. The user left Outlook
2003 running when the power outage hit. We restarted and everything comes
back. However...

In reading his email, he uses his preview pane which appears. If he clicks
"Delete" (the "X" at the top of menu bar), the message header element
disappears into "Deleted Items" but the message preview stays on the
supposedly deleted message. I won't go away even if we click on the next
message in the inbox. Other Outlook installs don't exhibit this behavior but
auto-move to the next message in line and display the preview pane contents
correctly for that next message. Now, if he moves from one message to
another in the inbox, the preview pane works fine. It's only when deleting
that the preview pane "gets stuck" on the deleted item's textual content.

We've visited Tools > Options > Preferences > Email Settings and ensured
that "When Deleting and Moving..." is set to "Return to the Inbox" which is
the way it's set on the others in the office. I haven't attempted to Detect
and Repair as I'm not sure exactly what this problem is.

I'd like to return this to normal operation. Anyone have a fix for this?

 

[Kathleen Orland]

Sounds like perhaps the PST corrupted during the power outage. I would
recommend repairing the PST file. This must be done with Outlook closed.

Use file/folder search to look for scanpst.exe. Double-click it and follow
the instructions. It will ask you to browse to your PST so you should know
the location. Run scanpst.exe against your PST. If it finds errors and
repairs them, run it again until it no longer finds any errors.

Then open Outlook again and see if that has resolved your issue.

Information about the PST file, including how to repair it:
http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/aboutpst.htm