Okay, I have been using Outlook 2003 since it was released, I am familiar with the s/w and I've made no changes to the settings in a l-o-n-g time. Then all of a sudden I start having issues when replying to emails. It just hangs, up to a minute at times, evenutally opening up the reply window. Thru Options I've tried unchecking the boxes 'use Microsoft Word as editor...' and when I replied to an email I get an error regarding ActiveX control, so I set it back. I would prefer using MS Word as my editor, but cannot deal with this lengthy delay.

Now today I found out that some of my email recipients are getting 'empty' emails or are having the same issue when trying to reply back to me. Was there a recent release that would impact Outlook 2003? As I mentioned, I have done nothing to alter my settings, no new s/w loaded, nothing. At a loss here and would appreciate any helpful suggestions on correcting the problem?

Have you been able to find a fix? Or even a cause? I have the same exact issue. I even tried to uninstall and reinstall the office suite, but the problem came right back. Don't know if this will help anyone in diagnosing the problem, but when I tried to uninstall I got the error message,

"The installation source for this product could not be found."

So I had to use the Windows Install clean up tool to remove office. Anybody have any advice?

I spent the entire day Sunday uninstalling windows updates, microsoft office, anti-virus applications, spysweeper, removing toolbars fom IE, gosh you name it, rebooting after each itme. Then I reinstalled everything, except spysweeper, and the issue is still there. I heard on another tech website that this issue is "worldwide" and Microsoft doesn't have a 'fix' yet. So for now I have found that the only solution is to reply by creating a new email. Betsy

Thanks for the response. As soons as I find something else that might help, I'll keep you posted. Please do the same.

Run SCANPST.exe
This seemed to work for me (at least for now). The scanpst repair tool is installed by default
<system root>\program files\common files\system\msmapi\1033

i think it has to do with a recent update that was pushed out by microsoft