On Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:21:00 -0500, "Diane Poremsky [MVP]"
wrote:

While you don't want a reply, I will comment for the benefit of others who
find the long missive... a corrupt outcmd.dat is rare (and will become rarer
as outlook 2010 doesn't use it). It happens most often during upgrades -
either in-place upgrading from an older version of outlook, or if easy
transfer is used to move outlook to a new machine. It is one of the 4 files
that doesn't upgrade from Outlook 2003 to 2007 well.

I didn't find it to be particularly rare, bing or google around a bit
and I think you'll find lots of folks have had the problem. I also
did not upgrade, this is the first install of Outlook I've ever had on
my home system, and it's been working pretty well for the past few
months. As I mentioned in my long missive, I went from being a long
time user of Eudora to this.

The real reason for the original post is to make the point that from a
software engineering standpoint, it is unexcusable to have an entire
application simply freeze up; completely locking the user out of an
application as critical (to most) as their e-mail client.

Particularly since outcmd.dat is apparently an optional file of little
consequence if deleted and recreated. All it takes is a little
defensive code to detect when something is out of whack with
outcmd.dat, and boycott loading that particular file but allowing the
user to continue so they can get to their e-mail. I think we could
all agree this seems a bit more elegant than resulting in a frozen
splash screen and a process that sits there and burns CPU cycles doing
nothing.