Why do the windows of my Outlook mail items become unusable after my application terminates?

Question

I have a VB6 application which creates and displays mail items in Outlook using Redemption's RDO. Everything works except after my application terminates the window of every mail item originally created and displayed by my application becomes unusable, i.e. I cannot send, save or print from that window.

Requested clarification: I create the items using GetDefaultFolder(olFolderDrafts).Items.Add and display them calling the Display method after I attached a file. The user has to send the item explicitly.

Depending on the action I get different generic messages, like "could not send mail" or "the messaging interface returned an unknown error".

I'm really desperate because I've run out of ideas.

What I've tried:

• Different logon methods: Logon and MAPIOBJECT
• Skipping Logoff
• Using GetObject instead of CreateObject (for the Outlook instance)
• Updating to the latest Redemption version

Some more information:

• The problem exists with Outlook 2007, but the same application works fine with Outlook 2000.
• The item is correctly saved, i.e. if I re-open it using Outlook everything works
• If I use plain Outlook objects everything works fine, too, so it must be something I'm doing wrong with Redemption.

EDIT: I downloaded OutlookSpy and after my window becomes unusable, every non-trivial action returns the error code 0x800706BA (RPC_S_SERVER_UNAVAILABLE). I assume that somehow the connection to the Exchange server is closed for that specific mail item.

• Is that possible?
• Is there anything I can do to prevent that from happending?

More observations:

• If I keep my application in memory, opening the same mail item from Outlook opens a new window. Normally the original window would be just brought into the foreground.
• Using Outlook 2000 the window I display does not have the additional OutlookSpy buttons.

EDIT 2009-11-17: If anyone has some more suggestions I'm still interested!

Answer 1

"creates and displays" is a little vague. Are you creating mail messages and putting them in the outbox? Are you actually sending the messages?

• I would make sure you are on the latest version of redemption. They have interesting relatively silent updates.
• I would try connecting directly to the MSFT APIs, disabling redemption, to see if that is the cause of your issues.
• I would try talking to the folks that build redemption to see if they have encountered the error.

Outlook crashing is not a big deal. Or, rather, it is a big deal but is relatively common. Not being able to handle mail is pretty darn annoying. I have run into messages that are locked before. On some cases, I have had to move them away from the outbox into some other folder and then move them back. Sometimes that is enough to get them to go out.

Good Luck, Jacob