I recently gave Google Apps Sync for Outlook a go – in order to determine whether somebody was having problems with Outlook or Google Apps. I ran it with Outlook 2010 and was very impressed with the program indeed. One complaint from the user was that Google Apps Sync creates a new Outlook profile which is not what they wanted. But I can completely understand why Google Apps Sync does this. And it’s not as though it doesn’t migrate the data in the existing Outlook profile – it give you the option to migrate all the data across, and it does the very well.
The problem I had was clearing out Google Apps Sync afterwards. I only use Outlook 2010 for testing purposes for the most part these days (until Microsoft ever decides to get around to implement a sane reply quoting system and one that doesn’t top post to boot) so I ununstalled Google Apps Sync and deleted the profile it had created. I was hoping to then switch the profile back to the default profile called “Outlook” but I couldn’t. Starting Outlook 2010 got me a “Can’t Start Microsoft Outlook” message, and attempting to fire up the Mail (32-bit) control panel application told me that I had no free system resources to do so. Uninstalling Office 2010, rebooting, re-installing, and tinkering with Windows registry would not get it working again.
Until I saw this Help Article on the Google Help Forums.
The instructions given by Jeffrey Roberson were spot on:
* Shutdown the computer and restart in safe mode
* Login as the user with the problem
* Launch the Mail control panel by hitting Win-R and typing in: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\MLCFG32.CPL”
* Delete all of the profile configuration so that it is blank
* Reboot
* Launch the Mail control panel as normal and setup the profile again.
* Launch Outlook.
(Note for Windows 7 64-bit users, the path to the control panel is has the (x86) in Program Files)
I don’t believe this is entirely Google’s fault, but rather mostly Microsoft’s for making data recovery a complete pain in the arse. No application should have to force you to go into Safe Mode of your operating system to fix this.

