In the course of normal operations applications will occasionally need to be shut down. And most of the time this will not be a problem. But every now and then a process or two will misbehave upon shutdown. In this article I’ll discuss some of the problems you might encounter when shutting down Outlook and the solutions that can help an administrator to correct them.

One of the problems that can occur upon shutdown is that rather than shutting down, it instead continues to run. Sometimes the issue is that another process or application is accessing the message store on Outlook. Other times the problem can be due to interference caused by another program such as anti-virus or anti-spam software, fax software or synchronization software used with personal digital assistants.

You can remedy the situation by doing the obvious: killing the process. If you have administrator privileges then just execute the old CTRL-ALT-DEL key sequence and click on the Task Manager button. Next locate and select the Outlook process and then click on the End Process button.

Once you get past the problem of Outlook not being able to shut down properly you may then have the problem of Outlook starting up afterwards. Sometimes related processes need to be synchronized or file checked for corruption at startup. Such files can include .pst and .ost files. Some of these files that need checking can come from other applications that run as add-ins to the Outlook application. So although you may be trying to shut down Outlook you must also be aware of other applications running in conjunction with Outlook which can impede the startup progress.

Some of the add-ins that can cause Outlook to keep running after it’s closed include: WinFax Pro, Earthlink’s Spamblocker, Cloudmark Spamnet and several other add-ins.

If you suspect that your problem is with other applications then go to the Tools menu and open the Trust Center. Look on the left-hand side and choose the Add-Ins option. You’ll see a list of Add-ins that have a status of either Active, Inactive or Disabled. Some of the add-ins are used for Outlook but others are related to applications such as Office and Exchange Server. An administrator will know which add-ins have been set up for use with Outlook.

After establishing the add-in that may be affecting the shutdown of Outlook the administrator can then disable them. From the drop-down list at the bottom of the window select the add-in type and click “Go”. At this point you can disable the add-ins related to Outlook from within the dialog box.

There are other types of applications that can affect the shutdown and startup of Outlook. If they can access Outlook data files then they are also potential problems. These other types of applications can include Windows Vista “gadgets” used for email notifications. Most often they are linked to Outlook data files which must be considered when disabling suspected applications. Note that in Windows 7 the sidebar.exe associated with gadgets is still running though not visible.

If you don’t know about gadgets then you need to know that gadgets are mini-applications built with Web technologies such as DHTML (Dynamic HTML), JavaScript, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and XML.

An administrator should know which of these gadgets to disable or remove. If not then the administrator can view which gadgets are running. You can use the Windows Key plus capital G shortcut to bring the gadgets to the foreground.

If you determine that one or more of these gadgets should be disabled then you can open the Control Panel and type “features” into the search box. Select the link for “Turn Windows features on or off” and click on it. Remove the checkbox from the Windows Gadget Platform, click the OK button and then restart your computer.

One of the things that administrators need to make users aware of is that the shutdown process of Outlook needs time to complete its tasks. The Outlook.exe process needs time to complete its internal processing and users should be forewarned about shutting down their Windows environment too soon or else they will have effectively created a forced shutdown early termination scenario for Outlook.

Administrators might want to consider wrapping the Outlook shutdown process with a script that warns against shutting down Windows until the Outlook process has safely exited.