So, I sit down to my PC this morning with a cup of coffee, click on my account name and was greeted with a BSOD & a memory dump. Wonderful way to start the day.

Upon restart and clicking my user account Vista took an unusually long time to boot to the desktop. Once it booted to the desktop I started Outlook 2007. All my info is there, but Outlook kept asking POP account passwords. Outlook is configured to save passwords and I went through repairing the accounts, changing the passwords on my email server(s), changing in Outlook, etc. Nothing worked. A quick search came up with a registry "fix", but before going into the registry I like to find other ways to correct an issue.

What fixed it was deleting the accounts from within Outlook, rebooting the computer then configuring the accounts as new. Everything works fine now.

Now I'm wondering why this happened and I saw that a few updates were installed at 3:00AM this morning, one of them being an Outlook 2007 Security update. Oh wonderful Microsoft. Oh, all of a sudden Windows Defender is giving a message that it cannot update. On to troubleshooting phase 2.

Mine went on ok. I did not see a "Outlook 2007 Security update" tho.

Good for you....and I mean that. I just spent the last hour reinstalling Vista. What I think happened to me was that updates were installed as Windows Defender was doing a scheduled scan and some system files got corrupted. Outlook got screwed up (I fixed that) & Defender couldn't update. As I was working on the Defender issue other error messages started to appear. I said screw it, let me do a clean reinstall - quicker than troubleshooting (I didn't make an image of my Vista installation yet because I'm still messing around with it and keep changing things).

Also, this is why I love having my data stored on a separate drive. The OS gets screwed up, big deal, my data is safe and that's what I care about. Makes it easy to backup as well. I just backup F: to G: (for instance) and that's it. As for the OS and applications they can always be reinstalled - just takes a couple of hours.

I prefer ghosting my drive from an external backup. That seems to be nice and clean and you can do it overnight.

This is such a wonderful idea and I wish more people did this. It's worked for me for 3 years and I'll keep doing it as long as I live.

you mean a totally separate drive??

Yes. I always use a minimum of two hard drives in my personal systems. One contains the Operating System and installed programs, the other contains all data files (docs, pics, music, movies, Outlook PST file, etc.). I use an external hard drive to backup the data files. If my OS should blow up, no big deal. It's still a PITA, but I don't get that sinking feeling in my stomach that all the data is gone. Install OS & programs, configure settings and I'm up & running. If the data drive should fail, well, that's what I have the backup drive for.



Great idea. That's what I meant by making an image of my Vista installation. I haven't done it yet because I'm still playing around with tweaking Vista....not to mention the size of the image that will be created. As of this post I installed Vista Ultimate & Office Enterprise. Total disk usage is 18GB. I still have a few programs to install.