Cannot Open the Outlook Window

I recently came across this problem tried a few steps to resolve it short of re-installing, none of the solutions worked. When you click on the icon to start Outlook, the outlook window shows up briefly and then disappears, popping up that error message: "Cannot Start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot Open the Outlook Window".

If you Google this problem, Microsoft’s site shows up, so you assume that the solution might be a good one. Actually, it didn’t work for me and is not even related to the actual problem at hand since they refer to this being an issue running Outlook in compatibility mode.

The solution? simply run: outlook.exe /resetnavpane on a command line

in my case i had to specify the full path to the binary.

c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\outlook.exe /resetnavpane

basically, this is the same as deleting your profilename.xml in your users directory.