It is no surprise that right now, Microsoft"s priority is to move users onto the New Outlook for Windows if they haven"t done so already. The company began default-deployment of the new app on fresh Microsoft 365 systems and also made switching between the New app and the classic app easier.
At the same time, the company is also trying to improve the new app as it recently added yet another feature that will allow people to use the app without an internet connection, and it also blocked more file types to improve security.
Perhaps as a consequence of this relentless pursuit, the classic Outlook app has become quite prone to bugs and issues in recent times as Microsoft may be losing its focus. For example, in April, the downloads for Classic Outlook broke and more recently, this month, the tech giant confirmed that a major Calendar feature upgrade has broken the app in several different ways. Microsoft has provided workarounds for several of the issues so check this article out if you are having problems.
And the bugs just keep on coming as Microsoft earlier today confirmed that opening emails or starting a new email will now crash the application, and it affects all channels. The company explains:
When you open or start a new email, classic Outlook crashes. This issue occurs because Outlook cannot open the Forms Library. This issue can occur for Outlook on all Microsoft 365 Office channels. The emerging cases for this issue are on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
Opening a mail on an email client is probably the most common and basic functionality a user is expected to do, so it is annoying to see such a bug not getting caught during testing. Again, this perhaps indicates that Microsoft"s focus maybe elsewhere at the moment.
The company has shared the Windows Event Viewer Log for the crash and the problematic OLMAPI32 DLL file is related to Microsoft Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI). The issue reminds us of the similar OLEAUT32 dll issue fix in our recent ReactOS article.
The event viewer log notes:
Faulting application name: OUTLOOK.EXE, version: 16.0.14334.20090, time stamp: 0x683fe030 Faulting module name: OLMAPI32.DLL, version: 16.0.14334.20090, time stamp: 0x683ff910 Exception code: 0xc0000409 Fault offset: 0x00196e1c Faulting process id: 0x9100 Faulting application start time: 0x01dbdbe04fe54514 Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\OUTLOOK.EXE Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\OLMAPI32.DLL Thankfully, Microsoft has issued a workaround for the problem as it currently investigates the bug by manually creating a FORMS2 folder which should exist at the following address: C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\FORMS2.
Microsoft explains:
You may be able to work around the issue by creating the FORMS2 folder. This folder is expected to exist at C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\FORMS2.
To create the folder, please do the following:
- Close Outlook and other Office applications.
- Select Start > Run and enter the path %localappdata%\Microsoft and select OK.
- In the File Explorer menu, select New > Folder and name it FORMS2.
You can find the support article for the issue here on Microsoft"s official website.