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.

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