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You receive a message when you shut down Windows 2000 Professional with Outlook 2002 running

Article ID: 304183

Article Last Modified on 1/31/2007

APPLIES TO

Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 1
Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 2
Microsoft Outlook 2002 Standard Edition

This article was previously published under Q304183

SYMPTOMS

If you try to shut down Windows 2000 Professional while Outlook 2002 is running, you may receive the following informational message:

Please close all Microsoft Office applications before shutting down the system.

You may receive the following error message after the informational message if the Office Assistant has not had time to start:

AGENTSVR.EXE - DLL initialization failed.

The application failed to initialize because the window station is shutting down.

And after a brief pause, you may receive the following error message:

This program is not responding.

To return to Windows and check the status of the program, click Cancel.
If you choose to end the program immediately, you will lose any unsaved data. To end the program now, click End Now.

CAUSE

This problem can occur because you attempted to exit Windows 2000 under the following circumstances:

While Outlook 2002 is running.
You have Microsoft Word as your e-mail editor and you have a Microsoft Word e-mail message window open.
The default Office Assistant (paper clip) is running or attempting to start.

RESOLUTION

Use the following steps to resolve this problem:

Click Cancel to close the Task Manager dialog box.
Click OK to close any error or informational messages.
Close all Outlook 2002 message windows, and then quit Outlook 2002.
Press CTL+ALT+DEL, and then click Task Manager.
On the Applications tab, verify that there are not any programs listed as Not Responding. If any are listed, click End Task.
On the Processes tab, verify that Outlook.exe is not listed. If it is listed, click End Process.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Microsoft Outlook 2000 when it is running on Windows 2000. This problem does not occur on Microsoft Windows 98.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

MORE INFORMATION

Both the Windows 98 and the Windows 2000 shut down processes behave differently. When Windows 98 shuts down, the operating system informs all process that are running that the operating system is shutting down, and the running processes have an opportunity to save their data. When Windows 2000 shuts down, it handles shutting down the processes that are running one at a time. As a result of the way Windows 2000 shuts down processes one at a time, a problem can occur when a running process, such as Microsoft Outlook, is shutdown before Microsoft Word has a chance to shutdown, or vice versa. To prevent against data loss in this scenario, the user is prompted with the Please close all Microsoft Office applications before shutting down the system dialog box that is described in the "Symptoms" section of this article.

Additional query words: OL2K

Keywords: kbshutdown kbbug kberrmsg KB304183

Microsoft KB Archive/304183

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