Today someone asked questions about a script I wrote back in 2007 to solve a bug in Outlook (2003 but at least Outlook XP has the same issue). If you have access to someone’s calendar and want to make a print of it Outlook wants to print it in it’s default view which is a combined view on calendar appointments and tasks. However if you do not have permissions to the other persons tasks folder Outlook refuses to print and displays the following error: The messaging interface has returned an unknown error. If the problem persists, restart Outlook.

To resolve it you can go to the Calendar | Daily View | Print, then click Page Setup and under Include Options deselect Taskpad. I didn’t want to do this for all users that’s why I wrote the script.

The settings is stored in a file called OutlPrnt which is stored in %appdata%\Microsoft\Outlook. I changed the setting through the GUI and watched the changes to that file, changed it back in watched the changes again. That’s how I discovered that this setting is stored at offset 0xE10 (dec. 3600) with the following possible values that correspond to the GUI options

Taskpad = 4
Notes area (blank) = 1
Notes area (lined) = 2

So to change this is a simple exercise in VBS, just use the FileSystemObject to read the file with the OpenTextFile method, skip to offset &HE10 and change it to the desired value. The script can be downloaded below.

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