Oh no! Outlook crashing on ntdll.dll! Whew, problem fixed!
So I woke up this morning and Outlook had crashed on me. Every time I'd try to restart Outlook, I'd get the same crash error—even rebooting didn't help. The error was in the ntdll.dll.
I figured maybe there as something in my POP3 account that Outlook was having problems reading, so I snagged a tool to allow me to read the headers and delete messages. In my POP3 account were some messages with some Shift-J encoding—so I thought for sure that was the cause of the crash. However, even after deleting those messages I was still getting crashes.
After over an hour of troubleshooting, I was getting pretty frustrated. I figured at this point it was either some Windows Update that installed itself or a add-on causing the issue.
The primary add-on I run is Cloudmark—which is a spam filtering tool. I decided to head on over to their Community Forums to see if anyone else was having this problem. Sure enough it seems like most Cloudmark users started experiencing the problem some time last night.
After reading through several more complicated solutions, I found one that was very straightforward and worked for me--just renaming the \Documents and Settings\[Profile Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Cloudmark. Here are the instructions from WildBill
In Vista, go to C:\Users\[Profile Name]\AppData\Local\ and rename the Cloudmark folder to Cloudmark.bad.
In XP, go to C:\Documents and Settings\[Profile Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Cloudmark and rename the Cloudmark folder to Cloudmark.bad.
Then start up Outlook and you're good to go. You do not need to uninstall or reinstall Cloudmark.
In order to preserve your whitelist settings, you'll want to copy 2 files over from the old directory to the new directory.
- Close Outlook.
- Copy the files cdol_firstunblock.dat and cdol_whitelist.dat from your old \Cloudmark.bad\SpamNet directory to your new \Cloudmark\SpamNet directory.
- Restart Outlook.
Those steps worked for me. So if you're having problems getting Outlook to work and you're running the Cloudmark Spam Filter tool, try these steps to see if Outlook starts working again. It worked great for me.
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Worked like a charm! Of course, Cloudmark has no mention of this on their support site.
Glad it helped someone else out. I can't claim to have come up with the solution, but I thought maybe some readers out there might be having the same issue...
Hey Dan,Your fix worked perfectly. Good show on the research, I thought I was going to have to uninstall the Symantec Antivirus add in again! ;P
1) Thank you for posting this2) Thanks to Google for indexing this page so damn quickly!
The same problem started for me this morning. This has fixed it. Looks like an official acknowledgement and fix is here: http://www.cloudmark.com/desktop/forum/viewtopic.p...
Thanks!Worked fine for me! (OBviously)
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!I spent hours trying to fix this problem yesterday with no luck.
Your suggested fix did the trick and I am so happy!!
Thank you so much!
Many thanks for your solutions; it worked instantly. We had spent more than 10 hours working this one out!
It worked like a charm. Our tech group was working all night for a solution. Thanks for posting it! :)
Thank you a million! We have worked on this for 2 days and unable to resolve until we read your information above. You are great!
I have also been working on this for 2 days and got nowhere until I found this entry. You are one smart dude! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Can I mail you a blank cheque!Thanks for the help.
OMG! Thank you!My IT dept wanted me to backup so that they could reimage my HD on Monday (kneejerk reaction)!
You solved my problem! Thank you very much!!!
This worked - after hours of running antivirus software and antispyware removal tools and so and so on; very much appreciated!
Oh my god I cant believe that fixed the problem. I kept getting that error report and tried everything for about 4 to 5 hours. I come in today find this blog and fixed everything. Cloudmark you can bite me.
I still think Cloudmark is one of the best tools for fighting spam.I've been using Cloudmark since it's early betas and this is the first problem I've seen like this.
It's really a shame, because it definitely can be a huge "black eye" when it comes to word of mouth referrals.
Hopefully they've learned their lesson and the plug-in will have better exception handling in the future.
A Million thanks...after 3 hours of searching / struggling I fond your fix which worked like a charm !Cheers !
Thanks a ton! I had a LinkedIn toolbar in Outlook which I removed after reading this description. All readers please try and remove any plugin you have installed in Outlook before you try any "kneejerk" reaction!!Cheers!
I found that the crash for me was caused by upgrading to Office 2007 and outlook automatically started using a French dictionary to correct spelling. I changed the dictionary to English, not an easy task in some cases, and everything was fine.
I am looking for the cloudmark folder, I cant fin it inside the aplication data folder or anywhere else, But I do have an error with ntdll.dll. file on outlook when it try to send/recieve. Any Ideas...Thanks!
this is my error AppName: outlook.exe AppVer: 12.0.4518.1014 AppStamp:4542840f
ModName: ntdll.dll ModVer: 5.1.2600.3520 ModStamp:498fff10
fDebug: 0 Offset: 0000100b
Any Ideas??
@Roberto:If you don't have the Cloudmark Outlook plug-in installed, then you'd have
no Cloudmark folder. If you do have it installed, it's possible they changed
the location since I posted that blog fix--but I can't confirm since I no
longer have Cloudmark installed.
The cause of the ntdll.dll seems to be when you have an Outlook plug-in that
is misbehaving. Try loading Outlook up in safe mode:
Hold down the [Ctrl] key when starting Outlook. The program displays a
dialog box that gives you the option of starting in Safe Mode.
That should temporarily disable all plug-ins. If that allows you into
Outlook, then you'll need to figure out which plug-in is causing you issues.