Outlook Remains in TaskList after closing (with AddIn)

[Jeff Simcock]

hi gurus

Apologies for cross posting to the above 2 newsgroups...but wasnt sure which
was the best for this post.

I have an Outlook Office AddIn which creates some Toolbar and menu items to
access it. It connects to SQL Server when activated and all works fine.

If I open Outlook but dont access the addin and then close Outlook, Outlook
does its normal ~5 second delay in the Task List before closing...all is
well.

If I open Outlook and access my addin logon form by just pressing the
toolbar item and not actually logging onto SQL Server, and then close my
addin form and then close Outlook, Outlook remains in the Task List forever.
In some cases (OS/OFFICE combinations) it even causes a crash. The DLL has
been built under VB6, Win2000 and Office 2000 as my clinets have various
platforms and so the LCN was chosen for compatability.

All the functions of the ADDIN work fine and do what they are meant to do.
This behaviour has only recently started occuring AFTER I added some fields
to one form, the relevant SQL statements and then rebuilt it and distributed
it.

When I run my VB App in debug mode in VB6 and follow the same process and
access the Addin and then close it and Outlook all works well. After the ~5
seconds the VB Addin IDTExtensibility2_OnBeginShutdown is triggered and all
appears to work well. Its just when I build the DLL and then run Outlook
that it all fails.

Any advice gratefully welcomed. If I have not given enough information
please interrogate me!!

cheers
jeff

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

In order for On_Disconnection to fire when Outlook is closed all Outlook
objects must be released first. So you will need to handle the
Inspector.Close and Explorer.Close events for their respective collections
and check for conditions like the following:

Private Sub objExpl_Close()
On Error Resume Next

'Current Explorer is closing--update identity to ActiveExplorer
Set objExpl = objOutlook.ActiveExplorer

'if this is the last Explorer, then objExpl = Nothing ->close down
If (objExpl Is Nothing) And (objOutlook.Inspectors.Count = 0) Then
UnInitHandler
End If
End Sub

'Call UnInitHandler in objInsp_Close event
Private Sub objInsp_Close()
On Error Resume Next

Set objInsp = objOutlook.ActiveInspector

If objOutlook.Explorers.Count = 0 And objOutlook.Inspectors.Count <= 1
Then
UnInitHandler
End If
End Sub

Of course you would have to maintain a collection of Explorers and
Inspectors in a wrapper collection to keep all the references alive as
needed and to instantiate members of those collections as Inspectors and
Explorers are opened.

See the ItemsCB VB 6 COM addin template on the Resources page at
www.microeye.com for an example of a lot of this plus an Explorer wrapper
plus workarounds for other common Outlook addin bugs.

 

[Jeff Simcock]

Ken

Thanks for this...it looks exactly like what is happening...I noticed your
reply to the thread "OnDisconnection event for Outlook Add-in" earlier after
I had posted this....

cheers and thanks again
Jeff