Entourage Stopped-up

January 26, 2004

I had a user whose Entourage was giving the spinning pinwheel of death (SPOD) immediately upon opening. She had replied to an email when the trouble began. There was one outgoing email sitting in her Outbox. I held down the Option key upon opening Entourage to rebuild the database, but both type of rebuilds failed to solve the problem. An fsck revealed no errors.

I went into the ~/Documents -> Microsoft User Data -> Entourage Temp folder and deleted everything in it (there was one temp file for every attempt to open Entourage; these were the result of the outgoing email). This didn't help.

I removed the identity from ~/Documents -> Microsoft User Data -> Office X Identities and Entourage became usable again. But when I put the Identities folder back, the problem was still there. So now I knew the trouble wasn't the installation of Entourage.

I tried several tricks to open Entourage and cancel the outgoing mail -- all to no avail. Then it dawned on me: what if I locked Entourage out of its own temp folder? So I went to ~/Documents -> Microsoft User Data -> Entourage Temp in the Finder, did a Get Info (in 10.2.8 Jaguar), opened Details in Ownership & Permissions and changed Access to "Read Only" under Owner. Then I opened Entourage and instead of giving me the SPOD, it threw an error. I was then able to delete the email in the Outbox and use Entourage normally.

Of course, I had to go back and assign "Read & Write" Access to the Owner of the ~/Documents -> Microsoft User Data -> Entourage Temp folder before I could send or receive any more email-- but after that things worked just fine.

As for the email reply that started all of this, when we tried to reply to that particular email, it gave us the SPOD again, so we had to do it all over again, but that was easy since I knew where to go. Since we could reply to other mail and create new mail with no problems, we deleted the errant email and replied with a new message and never looked back.