Belfry Images

If you can’t get your contact list coming up in Outlook, here’s a how-to that works well. Two things to look out for are Outlook not closing properly (it may run as a notification button, open Task Manager and kill the Outlook process off just to make sure) which seems to stop the fix from working, and the fact that right-clicking on the Outlook icon to get to mail settings doesn’t work if the Outlook icon is a shortcut (ie 99% of the time). To get into mail settings, open Control Panel then Mail once Outlook is shut down.

I just had a spanking new Dell start crashing. svchost.exe kept giving an application error on bootup:

svchost.exe … the instruction at “0x???” … the memory could not be ‘read’

In the application log & finding the error report for svchost.exe it reports that msi.exe (the Windows installer) was faulting.

This is an issue with an automatic update breaking the Windows installer. There is an update available from microsoft (I think it’s this one) but the page I found (Tech Blender: Windows Update Broke My Machine (svchost.exe — application error), and How to Fix It) gives a solution that works:

1. Turn off automatic updates (right-click on My Computer & go to the Automatic Updates tab)
2. Reset the computer
3. Go to Windows Update (in the Start menu or go to update.microsoft.com), use Express Updates and install the fix
4. Reset your computer again once the update is installed

From the looks the machine is working now. Thanks, Microsoft