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Q: Outlook 2010 has all of a sudden begun to freeze.  Clicking on an email results in the screen going opaque and the [Not Responding] message atop the screen.  Task Manager requires multiple attempts to shut it down.  Happens in both normal and /safe mode.  It appears to be triggered when clicking on emails that have embedded images, which previously never caused this problem.  I’ve performed the 8 troubleshooting steps in Microsoft’s Knowledge Base.

– Bill R.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

 A:  The main reason to run Outlook in Safe Mode is to see if eliminating add-ons and plug-ins makes the problem go away.  Since the problem persists in Safe Mode, we can eliminate those as the source of the problem.  Unless your installation of Outlook itself has been damaged, you can also likely eliminate Outlook itself as the problem.  (You can try repairing the installation, or simply re-installing it if you want to test this.)  That leaves the content of the e-mail itself as the problem.  It’s possible that a malformed link embedded within an e-mail could cause such a condition, although I would think the system would time-out after a few minutes rather than displaying a “Not Responding” message.  I wish you’d have told me more about the “8 troubleshooting steps” you followed.  There are hundreds of articles in the Knowledge Base, and I can’t really tell which ones you tried.  Better still, forward me an example of one of the e-mails that locks-up your system, and I’ll look at it for you.  I can’t promise anything – sometimes I get stumped too.  Just this past week I received an e-mail that had an embedded image, and on my iPhone it appeared perfectly normal, but on my PC (using Webmail yet) all I saw was a STOP sign, and some keywords of a rather adult nature.  I forwarded a copy of it to myself, and on my iPhone, the copy looked normal!  I still haven’t been able to explain that one.

Q: When starting Quattro Pro I get a blank screen for several seconds followed by the question “Do you want to allow this program to make changes to your computer?” A “yes” answer will start the program immediately. I have registered this program at least a half dozen times and reinstalled it twice but still get the same answer. I do not want to reduce the level of security to allow this program to operate normally. How do I get it registered with my computer as a trusted source?

– John S.
Alpine, Texas

A: That prompt comes from Windows User Account Control (UAC) which was revamped in Windows 7 to eliminate those “Allow/Deny” prompts that were so annoying in previous versions.  Unfortunately, this is part of the security system of Windows, and since you stipulated that you don’t want to reduce the level of security, there isn’t really a Windows-based option that will eliminate the problem.  Microsoft purposely didn’t provide any sort of pre-approval or trust mechanism, lest malware simply add itself to the trusted list before taking questionable actions.  I have to wonder though; exactly what is going on when Quattro Pro starts that is triggering UAC in the first place?  As the prompt says, the program is attempting to make changes to your computer configuration.  Why?  It sounds like you need to look into Quattro Pro and see exactly what it’s changing.  If you can eliminate that, the message should not pop-up anymore.