Outlook 2007 Randomly can't open .pst

[Cameron Shaw]

I had a user who had created a 97-2002 Personal Folders File and had reached
the 2GB limit. I advised her to make a Office Outlook Personal Folders File
since it's limit was much higher and then move the emails to this new .pst.

Once all the emails were moved she should get rid of the old .pst. She had
asked about sharing the .pst among co-workers so I added the .pst to my
outllook. and open both at the same time.

Her outlook errored out saying it couldn't find the .pst file. I remove it
from mine and re-added it to her's. Everything open fine from that point.

Every so often though she open's Outlook and get's this same error. The PC I
had used for this list has long been re-imaged multiple times and there
should be no other issues, but she is still getting this error.

I was hoping someone might have an idea why.

Thanks.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Do not connect to pst-files located on a network share. Disconnect the
pst-file from Outlook via File-> Data File Management..., close Outlook and
then copy it to her local hard disk. Then reconnect to the pst-file via
File-> Open-> Outlook Data File...

 

[Robbin Meng [MSFT]]

Hello Cameron,

Thanks for your post and Roady's input.

I agree with Roady that please try to move the PST back to local disk. If there is a remote .pst (over a network link), Microsoft Outlook tries to use the file commands to read from the file or write to the file,
but the operating system then has to send those commands over the network because the file is not on the local computer. This creates a great deal of overhead and increases the time it takes to read
and write to the file. Additionally, the use a .pst file over a network connection may result in a corrupted .pst file if the connection degrades or fails. Other Behaviors of .pst Files over WAN/LAN Links:

? All operations take longer.
? Write operations can take approximately four times longer than read operations.
? Outlook has slower performance than the Exchange Client.

Personal folder files are unsupported over a LAN or over a WAN link
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297019

In addition to Roady's good input, if you want to access an Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2003 .pst file from a different computer that has an earlier version of Outlook installed, or if you installed Outlook 2007
or Outlook 2003 and have decided to remove it and to use Outlook 2002 or earlier, you must change your .pst file back to an ANSI format.

The .pst file has a different format and folder size limit in Outlook 2007 and in Outlook 2003
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830336

Hope this helps.


Best regards,
Robbin Meng(MSFT)
Microsoft Online Newsgroup Support