Outlook To-do bar stuck "loading..." after running shortcut deletion

[jpriddy]

Good morning all.

I patched my EV over the weekend from EV 7.5 SP4 to SP6 to fix the issue that prevented shortcut deletion from running due to the task finding messages with missing attributes.  Now, my installation of EV dates back to when EV 7.5 was first released and we had never enabled shortcut deletion, so I tried it out on my mailbox first to see what it would do. 

It deleted all of my shortcuts older than a year as expected, but now my Outlook 2007 "To-do bar" only displays "Loading..." and never shows any tasks.  If I open the Tasks folder in Outlook, I get the same thing on the "To Do List" there, but I can click on my list of tasks and view them. 

I'm guessing the problem with the To Do List has something to do with me having mail messages that I had flagged for follow up that had shortcuts deleted, since my actual Task items seem to work OK, and this problem didn't occur until after the old mail item shortcuts were deleted from my inbox.

Any ideas?  I'm running Exchange 2007 on the mailbox server.

Thanks in advance

[JesusWept3]

does it affect every user or just a certain amount?
are you in cached mode?
does it follow you from one workstation to another or just the profile you are using?
if you created a new profile with non cached mode, does it work properly then?
Given all the changes to your mailbox via shortcut deletion does Outlook say that its fully up to date?
if you are in cached mode, and non cached mode works ok, what happens if you run a repairost.exe?

[jpriddy]

Hi,

It's only affecting me... I added my mailbox to a test provisioning group and policy that had shortcut deletion enabled, so my mailbox is the only one that it ran against.  The problem followed me to another workstation and to OWA.

Not using cached mode on any of my profiles.

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Seems to be common to outlook outside of EV

You can either do the solution here:
http://www.msoutlook.info/question/345
Start -> Run -> "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\office12\outlooK.EXE" /resettodobar

Or the more drastic one here:
http://blog.palehorse.net/2008/04/15/how-to-fix-the-outlook-to-do-bar-stuck-loading-problem/

"If you happen to see any weird Outlook UI issues, first thing to try, in my opinion, is renaming (and therefore rebuilding) the 
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.XML"

[jpriddy]

JW2,

The /resettodobar switch repaired it... thanks.

I'm going to test this with a few more people, and if I encouter it elsewhere, I can use my login script to push the rename of the outlook.xml file on everyone's computer

Thanks!