A Good Lesson
Note to self: ALWAYS check the event viewer, stupid.You guys sent me some excellent advice, most of which I was too chicken to use. I approach system problems with an extreme degree of caution, mostly because I don't want to do anything that can't be undone.
Then Scott (among others, but he was both first and extraordinarily clear) e-mailed and said I should check the event viewer. In XP, that's Start>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Event Viewer.
I saw three errors listed under Applications that were happening every time I tried to open Outlook, and two of them mentioned Cloudmark, which led me to the Cloudmark forums, where I discovered that all of us were having the same problem at the same time.
So the event viewer is an excellent, non-invasive step to get clues about what's going wrong. And when you get an Event ID from the error, you can go to www.eventid.net, which will give you more information based on the event number.
Problem now solved. Of course, since I'm in the event viewer already I notice this error (which has apparently been coming up for a while, but since I wasn't checking the event viewer, I didn't know):
The performance strings in the Performance registry value is corrupted when process Performance extension counter provider.
Ah, crap.
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