Hello all.

I've been developing a C# Addin for OL2002/2003 and encountered a strange
problem.

Sometimes inspector's Close event is fired before the Activate handler finishes.
This can be reproduced by opening many inspectors and then closing them sequentially
as fast as possible. Logs show that Close handler is invoked before the Activate
handler finishes. Both handlers are executed in the same thread. As you can
imagine, this causes numerous problems, since the Close handler frees resources
allocated on Inspector creation.

First I thought that the reason might be an invokation of the message loop
(by calling Application.DoEvents() for example) hidden somewhere inside Activate
handler or its callees. But a thorough code analysis showed this is not the
case (at least in the addin). However the Activate handler makes many calls
to the Outlook object model.

I've made some protection from this situation: I don't free any resources
(that is normally done on Close) until Activate handler finishes. But it
looks like Outlook sometimes releases its internal objects before Close event
is fired, so Activate event handler cannot continue - any access to Outlook
object model causes either a null reference exception or a "COM wrapper"
exception.

Does anybody know the real cause of that? Does my addin do something wrong,
or is it an Outlook's "feature"?

The only workaround that comes in mind is creating proxies for Outlook objects
to use them in Activate event handler (as well as in all other handlers).
These proxies would check if the inspector is "closed" before any real operations.
But this decision is quite costly.

Is there a simpler solution?

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

WBR,
Sergey Anchipolevsky