If your users are using Outlook and they are complaining about their spell checker not working then there may be more than a couple of ways to fix this.

Sometimes the spell checker seems to stop working after a new version of Office 2007 has been installed. The problem will show up when your user attempts to run the spell checker in either MS Word or Outlook. One of the situations that shows the problem is when your user highlights some text, and runs spell checker, then they get a message back stating that the “…spelling and grammar check is complete.” But none of their spelling errors were corrected.

You can try having them turn off “Detect language automatically”.  This will sometimes fix the problem.

Knowing how Outlook spell checker works can be useful. In Office 2007, Outlook doesn’t use MS Word as its editor.  Instead, Outlook has its own abridged version of Word embedded in a .dll file. This makes Outlook independent of MS Word. But while the spelling and grammar functions (proofing libraries) are shared, the user’s custom dictionaries are not shared. So any spellings that get added to the Word dictionary have to be added separately to the Outlook dictionary.

Another scenario where the spell checker within Outlook Express does not work is when you try to spell check some text and get back the message “An error occurred while the spelling was being checked.” It’s possible that your version of Outlook Express did not have a spell checker or one was installed but a critical file is missing. When this is the case you can install the missing file. Outlook Express can also make use of the spell checker in the Microsoft Office or Microsoft Works package.

When you suspect that your problem is due to a missing file, the file to check for installation is a system file csapi3t1.dll. You can check to see if this file is installed by clicking on Help About. This file is required to be installed for spell checker to work. It was reported that Windows XP did not install this file.

After you have located a copy of the csapi3t1.dll file you should install it in the folder “C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedProof”.

• In the lower left corner click Start and then select Run.
• When you get the text field box  type msconfig and hit Enter.
• When the System Configuration Utility comes up click the button that is labeled Expand File. You want to be very careful in this area because making a mistake here can cost you major downtime. If you are uncertain then please get a senior sysadmin to help out.
• In the “Expand One File from Installation Source” dialog box type the name of the file you want to restore – in this case it is “csapi3t1.dll” – and then select the location to restore from. The file may be coming off of a CD or a folder (i386 folder, for example)  that is being used to hold the file. If you can’t locate your file on disk then you should look for the file on an Office CD. You may also be able to pull out a copy of the “csapi3tl.dll” file from the file mailnews.cab in an Internet Explorer 5.0 or 5.5 distribution set. Other sources include: the file win98_27.cab on a Windows 98 CD or the file Win_10.cab on a Windows Me CD.
• Enter the name of the destination folder to restore the file to such as: C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedProof.
• Next, click Expand. A restart of Windows may be needed.
• And verify that “Always check spelling” has been enabled in Tools, Options, Spelling.

There are also other symptons of spell checker not working in conjunction with Outlook Express and these include:

Clicking on Send in a message in Outlook Express, your end user gets the following error message:  “The spell check on this document was halted. Do you want to send anyway?”

Clicking on Spell on the Tools menu in a message, your end user gets the following error message:  “An error occurred while the spelling was being checked. “

If your end user tries to edit their custom dictionary in Outlook Express, they get an error message that says something like:  “Cannot find the file ‘C:<folder>CUSTOM.DIC’ (or one of its components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are available. “

Or you might find that the Spelling button is just not available from the toolbar and that the Spelling command is unavailable on the menu.

These error messages may be caused by incorrect entries in the registry. They may also be caused by incorrect permission to access settings.

You may need to go into the registry and make corrections. Always backup your registry before making any changes as mistakes there can have serious consequences.

The following keys will need to be verified for valid paths and file names:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftShared ToolsProofing ToolsSpelling1033Normal

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftShared ToolsProofing ToolsCustom Dictionaries

Again, remember to backup your registry before making any changes so that you will have a known working point to restore from should you encounter any problems after changes have been made to the registry.