I had installed the Office 2007 beta 2 release to a server today, testing out functionality with the product I work on which requires Outlook for MAPI connectivity to MS Exchange. When the time came to rollback, I used the correct uninstall method (Add/Remove Programs) and rebooted before reapplying Outlook 2003.

Now, when opening an existing Outlook profile the app terminates when trying to access the profile settings (you get the lovely ‘do you want to restart in safe mode’ and ‘would you like to detect/repair’ loop going.
Trying to create a new Mail profile (either from the Outlook dialogue or from the Mail applet) resulted in this error:

There was an error locating one of the items needed to complete this operation. It might have been deleted.

Kind of makes sense I guess, the profiles were created in OL12 which was removed but the question is, how the hell do I get out of that loop?

Looking through the registry, the uninstall hadn’t removed the 12.0 keys from

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0

..so I got shot of them, still no dice.

The last thing I checked was Mapisvc.inf - both versions in system32 and %program files%\Common Files\MSMAPI\1033 were identical and hadn’t been modified since i’d installed OL12. Bingo. Once I deleted both of them, the next start of Outlook recreated the files and everything is swimming now.

Lets hope MS remember to clean up a little better in the RC and Gold versions :D