Hmm.

I was reading my mail this morning. Shutdown Outlook to do something else ( I do this, I don’t like leaving Outlook running otherwise it eats your day ).

I run it up later on and notice that the reading pane isn’t displaying the selected mail. I double click on a mail and Outlook tells me;

“Unable to display mail. The Text Formatting Command is not Available”

Weird! All I’ve done since I last ran Outlook is to do some stuff in Visual Studio. I didn’t think that would have broken Outlook 😦

I do a bit of a search and the only KB article I can find is;

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/235244/en-us

which tells me to uninstall/reinstall IE but that seems a bit scary in that I have IE8 whereas this article was written around IE4 which feels like a very long time ago.

I opt to do a “Repair” on “Office Enterprise 2007” and see if that resolves anything for me.

And…it does. Or maybe it does. It asks me to reboot and I don’t feel confident enough to ignore it so I let it reboot the box and when it comes back up I can read mail once again in Outlook. So, either the reboot fixed it or the repair fixed it but either way it’s back and alive.