New or Reply Email Disappear - I HATE THIS! (Office 11 (2003))

[hobkirk]

I started using Outlook 2003 for email (I don't use any of its other capabilities). I've avoided Outlook until now because I saw no advantage that would offset the tremendous overhead. But Outlook 2003 has some very cool features - creating and editing in Word is GREAT, the SPAM filter is GREAT.
I have been using Windows 2000 Small Business Server and Office 2003 on a new hard disk for a month.
I am doing nothing fancy other than customizing the toolbars.
There have not been any viruses found by the latest AVG, AdAware, or Spybot.
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Word became unusable.
It started when cut/paste or drag within an email (or sometimes a non-email document) would occasionally trigger a fault in Word.
Then it became more frequent.
Last night any changes or attempt to save would cause a fault.
There was no change after I followed instructions to remove TMP files, modify the registry, etc.
I did "repair/reinstall" Office 11.
Hooray! It works!
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I sent 4 emails this afternoon - simple stuff.
Then Word in Outlook stopped working!
Any new email will disappear as soon as I type anything in the address or the body.
Any reply disappears after about 1 or 2 seconds.
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THIS IS DAMN DEPRESSING!
I am preparing myself to deal with reformatting my hard disk and reloading everything and then tweaking it all.
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I HATE THIS!
This is not acceptable performance!
The CIO Magazine satisfaction survey had Microsoft in the bottom ten vendors - 16%!
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Please help me with this Outlook problem if you can. I would love to avoid reloading everything.

[jscher2000]

First, can you isolate the problem to using Word as your e-mail editor? This has always been a touchy area, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are bugs in that interaction. Second, if you choose to reinstall, try using the Profile Wizard or "Save my settings" wizard to capture your customizations to ease the next round of setup.

[unkamunka]

Following on from <!profile=jscher2000>jscher2000<!/profile>'s suggestion, try seeing whether any of your Word customisations (recent or accumulated over the years) are affecting the situation. Move your existing Normal.dot file out of its existing location and let Word create another one. If you have any custom templates that you are using with Word (including Adobe Acrobat, if relevant) try moving these out of their default locations to see whether they are affecting the situation. If there is a change, try adding them back one by one until the problem behaviour starts re-occurring. HTH