Outlook 2016 crashes?

etherealfocus

Senior member
Jun 2, 2009
488
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Got a friend trying to use Outlook 2016 with an outlook.com account and a gmail account. Outlook.com account seems to work fine but Outlook crashes during sync after I add the Gmail account. I get a generic "Microsoft Outlook has stopped working" message... it 'looks for a solution to the problem' for about 10 seconds then crashes to desktop.

I tried deleting her pst/ost files and redownloading, then creating a new profile from scratch... same issue. The computer is a 1-2yr old laptop running Win10, seems pretty close to factory settings. She doesn't do much but light office work. Crashes using outlook.exe /safe too.

Any ideas?
 

Dahak

Diamond Member
Mar 2, 2000
3,752
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mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
17,708
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I don't know, I think it's unlikely that incorrect server settings could cause a mature e-mail program to crash (IMO it would be extremely risky in a security sense if a rogue mail server (say on a mispelt domain name) could cause the client to crash consistently).

Telling Office to repair itself (through Control Panel > Programs & Features) seems like a good idea, also running this command at an admin command prompt:

dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

As it was an official solution for a mangled Office + Win10 setup soon after Office 2013/365 was released IIRC.

In addition to dahak's advice, there's another gmail setting you need to check which is under the general Google account settings (ie. when you go through the website), there's a setting labelled (under security) "allow less secure apps". Checking your account settings as well as gmail's settings is advisable because if either are wrong, you won't manage to connect to gmail through Outlook at all.