Outlook won't open, splash screen comes up briefly and then disappears again and the program quits

Anonymous
2012-09-13T03:11:43+00:00

My mother's installation of Outlook 2011 has suddenly stopped working.  When she tries to run it, the splash screen comes up briefly (like for about a second or less) and then disappears again and the program quits.  This is all that it does.  It does not display any kind of error message.  It just quits.  There is a file sitting on her Desktop titled Sent Items.mbox and the Get Info window and icon suggest that this file is connected to Outlook.  I assume that this is the file containing her sent emails, but I can’t find where it is supposed to go.

What I am think is that my mom was poking around in folders that she should not have been in an accidentally moved this file out of its correct location and that Outlook, not finding it, is simply quitting.  Is this what is happening?  Can someone tell me where this file is supposed to go?

Outlook | MacOS | Legacy Outlook for Mac | For business

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Anonymous
2015-05-26T15:32:33+00:00

It might not be on autoupdate yet (no idea what's holding it up).

You can download and install manually from there though:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3048688

          Corentin

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-05-18T16:54:31+00:00

    This worked. Thank you.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-05-20T16:30:29+00:00

    Hello, Im having the same issue. Where do I copy and paste~/Library/Preferences so that I can delete that outlook preference?

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-05-20T18:03:13+00:00

    deleting the com.microsoft.outlook file worked temporarily.  After shutting down Outlook, the problem re-occurs.  I go in and delete the com.Microsoft.Outlook file again  and everything is ok .  I deleted it by going to Terminal and typing 'defaults delete com.microsoft.Outlook; killall cfprefsd'. 

    How can I make this fix permanent?

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-05-20T18:15:04+00:00

    MS released a 14.5.1 update yesterday that should correct the issue.

              Corentin

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