Google Desktop and Outlook aren’t getting along.

Monday, August 14, 2006

So, I’ve been troubleshooting a problem with my Google Desktop Search installation for a week now… GDS indexes my email perfectly, I can search and find whatever email I’m looking for… but when I click the “View in Outlook” link, it brings my Outlook window to the foreground and then just sits there and blinks at me.

Naturally, the first thing I did was attempt to find some answers on Google Groups, but all I found were more people with the same problem and not a decent answer as to why. The only thing they have is “Why are the toplinks not working”, which didn’t solve my problem at all.

After prying around for a long time, I finally figured out the problem… at some point I had run an antivirus software on my computer, and it must have blocked the outlook scripts from running. Sure enough, that was the case.

The problem was neatly solved by following the instructions on this microsoft link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244264/EN-US/ You’ll want to check the “Checking the Automation Server” section of the KB article, and follow the instructions there.

I’m finally able to use GDS again!

Update (08/21/2006):

More information over on Google Groups

Filed in Misc, Google | | Permalink

4 Responses to “Google Desktop and Outlook aren’t getting along.”

  1. Rob Says:
    August 21st, 2006 at 1:36 pm

    I’m having a similar problem.I took a look at that MS KB but I’m totally confused! Which part of the KB helped?!?!

    Thanks!

  2. Johnny Says:
    August 21st, 2006 at 1:52 pm

    In the “Checking the Automation Server” section of the KB, you’ll see the list of CLSID’s. I navigated to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\{0006F03A-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
    key, and there was a subkey called InprocServer32.

    In the default value, I noticed the key was set to the location of some script blocking component from Symantec. I’m not sure how that got on my machine, but all I did was remove that, and everything started working.

    You might want to take a look at this link as well: http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Desktop_Something-Broken/browse_thread/thread/303f31f64b761650/

  3. Rob Says:
    August 22nd, 2006 at 11:40 am

    As it turned out my registry was missing the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Outlook.Application branch. There was an HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Outlook.Application.11 branch so I exported it, edited the reg file and brought it back in and BINGO! YAY!

    Thanks for the help Johnny!

  4. Reed Says:
    April 13th, 2007 at 7:29 am

    I was experiencing the same problem as you, and I also found a weird Symantec script blocker just as you described. Deleting it did the trick!

    Thanks so much for the info! You’ve saved me a lot of headaches.

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