Keep Getting "Outlook closed while you had items open. Reopen items from last session?" Even Though It's Not True

Unchecking that "Store My Outlook Settings In the Cloud" was one of the very first things I did when I got my (then)new pc back over a year ago and set up Office, and I have verified that that box is still unchecked, and I still get 'occasional' "Reopen Items..." messages when I start Outlook.

Ever since someone tried to file a tax return in my name about 5 years ago, and then 2 years ago tried filing for state unemployment in my wife's name I don't trust ANY piece of personal information to 'The Cloud'. Heck, even just the act of transmitting that kind of data across the ether from my secure storage to their secure storage is open for possible hacking. So, when I found that "Help" won't work in MS Word UNLESS you allow MS to transmit usage data to their servers 'to allow them to make the application better', I was not happy in the least. But, what ya gonna do...?

Didn't work

Well I just did the following back on the 13th July:

#1 Run Outlook as an Elevated Process (i.e. as Administrator) this is so that if Outlook needed to set stuff outside the Users location (i.e. SYSTEM LOCATIONS)#2 Once opened if popup saying closed with open files, then click on NO.

#3 Disable storing the Outlook settings under Cloud storage options shown in the image below:

#4 Run Registry Editor and set (add DWORD 32-bit item with name ReopenWindowsOption if not already there) ReopenWindowsOption and set its value to 1 in the following location: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Preferences

#5 Close Outlook and Reboot-System just to make sure new settings are loaded up.

To be honest I think it might just be the disabling of Outlook saving its settings on the cloud that was causing this issue, but I thought I would say what I changed just in case it was a combination of what I did as a whole.

If you disable the Cloud settings save you will need to have that Registry Set!

Image of Outlook settings in the cloud:

Image of Registry Editor:

I have not gotten any more of those popups since (almost a month).

I think the issue might be linked to the remote Cloud saving of the settings which is why it would ignore what you had set in the Registry, which is why it needs that registry added when you disable the saving the settings to the cloud.

Got an interesting one today when I started up my pc and opened Outlook. I previously added that " /restore" to the Outlook icon/shortcut and didn't have a problem for the last two days. The only quirk I had was that I would click on the icon in my taskbar and it would open but remain minimized and I had to click again to get it up in a window. (That's the same thing I've had with "Snipping Tool" after an update 2-3 months ago, i.e., click on the taskbar icon and it opens but remains minimized.)

Well, this morning I clicked on my Outlook icon and it opened in a window but it also opened the top email message (last received yesterday night that had been previously read) in my inbox (all on it's own) and also gave me the "Reopen items...?" box. When I closed last night, there were no unopened emails and double-checking Task Manager showed no Outlook task still open.

A known bug or problem that is predictable can be fixed or worked around but when you get erratic behavior, I don't know about you but I start getting a bit nervous. I guess it's time to go back to daily backups again...