Craig Mayhew’s Blog

Had a bit of a nightmare with this as you can’t even get into safe mode to fix the problem. Running a start up repair from the windows CD does nothing. This leaves us with two options for fixing or working around the issue.

Option 1:
– Revert to a previous restore point using the windows CD to boot into recovery/repair mode. Obviously this only works if you have restore points.

Option 2:
1. Insert your Vista CD/DVD into your drive and boot from it.
2. Select “Repair your Computer” from the list.
3. Select “Command Prompt” from the recovery choices.
4. At the command prompt type C:
5. Type cd WindowsWinSxS
6. Type rename pending.xml pending.xml.bak
7. Exit and reboot

Please remember that option 2 will cause problems if you need to update in future. If and when I solve that, I’ll write a blog and post a link to it.

E text editor recently started instantly crashing no matter how I opened it. The fix was to delete or rename the “config.db” and “e.db” files in the following directory (be sure to replace %username% with your actual windows username):

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\e

If you get a corrupt mailbox with Microsoft Outlook, when you open outlook it will kindly tell you which mailbox is corrupted and tell you to use Scanpst.exe to fix it. Unfortunately it doesn’t tell you where Scanpst.exe is!

Windows 2000:
In Windows 2000, you can locate Scanpst.exe on the CD:
<CD drive>:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\1033\NT\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe

Windows XP
If you have Microsoft Office installed:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
If you don’t have Microsoft Office installed, try here:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe

Windows Vista
C;:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively, if you have Microsoft Office:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Programme\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1031\Scanpst.exe

Internet Download
If you still can’t find the Inbox Repair Tool, you can download it from here (http://www.emailaddressmanager.com/outlook/Scanpst.exe) then copy it to one of the above folders so it can easily be found again.