Ever see one of those Magic 8-balls?  You ask it a question, flip it over, shake it a little, and when you turn it back up, a ghostly answer slowly appears in the window, almost like a crystal ball.  There’s an unmistaken jolt when your paradigm shifts and you learn that – it’s not really “magic”… it’s just a floating multi-sided shape carried in some dense liquid and the answer doesn’t pertain to you at all.  It’s just a selection made by the shaking, moving and completely random acts of the person holding the 8-ball.

We all experience this newfound amazement at the world at different times in our lives.  This paradigm shift happened to me last week – when did it happen for you? 

Anyway, one of my favorite “answers” from that little all-knowing toy was “Outlook not so good”

However, nowadays, the Magic 8-ball isn’t telling me about my day, or the foreshadowing of things to come, or the ominous dark cloud that is evidently hovering over me, following me with every turn I make.

No.  Instead, it’s talking about Microsoft Outlook.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Outlook.  I couldn’t do my job without it.  I really like lots of it’s many features, it’s easy to use, it’s very powerful and it gets better every time a new version comes out.

But sometimes things just don’t work right.  The impetus for this specific post, for example, is how Outlook (and Word, I presume), forget to remove the taskbar remnants of composition windows.

See those email icons?  Those are composition windows.  Typically, it would indicate an OPEN composition window.  But in my case, all of these have been sent already.  There is no window to click on.  The email is gone.  When I try to click on the taskbar item (any of the highlighted lines above), it just sits and stares at me like a cow that found a new gate.  If I right-click on that specific item and select “close” it refuses to close.  Or it’s ignoring me.

If I completely exit Outlook and go back in, they disappear.  However, given that I have > 3.5GB OST file and several gigabyte-sized PST files, opening and closing Outlook is not a quick and easy task like, say, reading War And Peace. 

I assume MS Word has something to do with it, since I use Word as my composition program (it’s an option in Outlook).  I haven’t tried switching to another method, but I might.  It seems this problem started when I upgraded to 2007 – I should mention that I had Office 2003 installed, upgraded Outlook only, and then later upgraded the entire Office suite.

Anyone else see this?  I tried googling for hours and my acne is still there I haven’t found anything related.  I don’t even know what right words to search for.