Disappearing Outlook Menus

[MWE]

Almost two years ago I posted an item about disappearing Outlook Menus, see http://www.vbaexpress.com/forum/show...highlight=menu
in which I described a problem where any custom menu picks disappeared every month or two. I received no replies or suggestions.

To solve the problem, I started using a general purpose "menu builder" I had written for Excel and subsequently expanded to work with any MS Office application. It worked flawlessly in every MS Office 2000 (including ol). My original intent re ol2K was just to be able to build the menus very quickly but I found that menus built this way did not disappear.

I am now running on a new computer, a new build of WinXP and Office2003. I have continued to use the "automated" menu building approach and it works without any problems in any MS office 2003 application except Outlook. Menus are created and work fine, but "permanent" creations eventually disappear.

The problems with Outlook menus are:

• manually constructed menu items disappear after a month or so; it does not matter if these items have been added to a "New Menu" or to an existing ol menu
• permanent menus constructed using the menu builder routine disappear after a few days. As with manually built menu items, the top level menu is still there, but any picks underneath have disappeared
• as silly as this sounds, it is as though there is a program run by ol periodically that purges ol of any custom menu items regardless of their location.

Any thoughts on what might be going on here?

[JP2112]

Are you using any other add-ins?

[MWE]

I have fiddled with add-ins and even when none are "active", I still get the same problems.

I know that Add-Ins can be a problem. I have a lot of trouble with Word menus disappearing and being corrupted about two years ago. Turns out that the version of Adobe Acrobat (6?) I was running had some problems with its Word "add-in". As soon as I uninstalled Acrobat, all the problems went away. I stopped using Acrobat and switched to Nitro.

Actually, there are three problems with dynamically built Outlook menus:

1. the disappearing menu items outlined in my first post (this happens within a few days every time I rebuild the menu). The current work around is to build the menus as temps and rebuild them each time ol opens
2. main menu and 1st level subs remain but any 2nd level picks are gone (this happens once in a while -- a day or two after rebuilding the menu)
3. no faceids visible. This happens all the time but only when building menus in Outlook. The faceids are actually "there", just not displayed. If I manually "customize" any of these menus, and select Edit Button Image, the bit map image displayed is correct. If I then click OK, the faceid is displayed correctly.

Any help would be appreciated.

[JP2112]

You might want to try searching the MS KB for keywords like "custom menu items disappear" and so on, to see if MS is aware of the issue and/or has a workaround.

You could also try removing the add-ins completely, restart Outlook and use it for a time before reinstalling. Install one at a time slowly, and see what happens.

[MWE]

Thanks for the reply. I have not done a thorough search -- I had assumed that a problem so "blatent" would be common knowledge. I will poke around the MSKB as you suggest.

I disabled all ol addins a few days ago and the problem persists. The distinction between "disable" and "remove" re ol addins is curious. MS uses the terms interchangeably for some ol addins. The Add-In Manager can "disable" an addin, but not remove it. The info on the MS web site re addin removal says "disable it". The COM Add-In tool can remove them ?? I have read that some addins are not listed in either tool, so removal is difficult. The company behind "Bells & Whistles for Outlook" makes that claim.

I know that some ol addins do not behave themselves re 'removal" as you would expect. For example, I run AVG Internet Security. Their SPAM tool is about useless; so I disabled it from the AVG console. But that did nothing regarding the AVG addin for ol. I had to manually "disable" it.