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MS Outlook 2000 - Unable to find the WAB.DLL - New DELL Inspiron 545 MT (Windows 7)

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Latest post 11/08/2009 06:05 AM by ejn63. 3 replies.
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Joined on 11/07/2009
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MS Outlook 2000 - Unable to find the WAB.DLL - New DELL Inspiron 545 MT (Windows 7)

07 Nov 2009 05:12PM

I have just bought a Dell Inspiron 545 MT (Windows 7) which came with a 60 day frre trial of MS Office 2007.  As I already have MS Office 2000 professional  I installed this rather than spend another £200 in 60 days time. I configured outlook to send and receive e-mails. E-mails started to come in no problem. However when I tried to import my e-mails from an export file I created on my old PC I get the following message:

An error occured while attempting to open the Windows Address Book. Unable to find the WAB.DLL

I find I cannot send e-mails either as I get the same message.

I checked the microsoft site and it seemed to suggest renaming the wab32.dll file, uninstalling and then re-installing Outlook.  On searching the C: drive I found 4 occurences of wab32.dll  I was able to rename 2 of them (once I'd set the permissions on the files) though the other 2 I can't rename despite being the owner of the files. Anyway, I reinstalled outlook 2000 and same problem.

I still have my old PC running (Windows XP) and I thought I'd check the wab.dll on there. I discovered the file is called OUTLWAB.DLL and was in the C:\Windows\System32 directory.  I copied this file to the same location on my new Dell Inspiron as well as the 4 other places the wab32.dll I'd found. This made no difference.

I don't no where to go from here. Is Outlook 2000 incompatible with Windows 7 ?  Has the pre-installed Office 2007 trial prevented me from installing an older version of Office?

Despite liking many of the features of Windows 7, I'm considering formatting my new PC and installing Windows XP if its stopping me from running Office 2000.

Any Ideas?

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Joined on 11/19/1999
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Re: MS Outlook 2000 - Unable to find the WAB.DLL - New DELL Inspiron 545 MT (Windows 7)

07 Nov 2009 07:47PM

Office 2000 is incompatible with Vista and windows 7. Windows XP will probably not run on your new computer. The new hardware on the new computer will not have XP drivers. See if you can find a copy of Office 2003 Student and Teacher edition--that has Outlook 2003 and Word, PP and Excel. That works fine. You should uninstall the trial edition of Office 2007. If you didn't click on the trial icon, it's not installed. Just delete the icon. Check the Programs list in Control Panel to be sure.

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Joined on 11/07/2009
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Re: MS Outlook 2000 - Unable to find the WAB.DLL - New DELL Inspiron 545 MT (Windows 7)

08 Nov 2009 03:38AM

Thanks for the info,

Mightily unimpressed as I thought one of the features of Windows 7 was that, unlike Windows Vista, it would run all your old software back to the Windows 95 era. Seems to me that Windows 7 is no better than Vista and I may end up installing Windows XP professional (I have the XP discs).

I've tried Windows LiveMail that comes with Windows 7. Not impressed - no facility to import the thousands of e-mails and contacts from my old PC.

Having blown my budget on the PC, and Christmas coming up, buying a new version of Office is not an option at present.

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Re: MS Outlook 2000 - Unable to find the WAB.DLL - New DELL Inspiron 545 MT (Windows 7)

08 Nov 2009 06:05AM

If Office 2000 is the only Microsoft option, use something else.  It has serious fundamental security flaws in it that Microsoft hasn't and won't patch.  The oldest supported version of Office is 2002 (XP).

 

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