Outlook – Can’t Create File…

Outlook LogoI got a call from a user yesterday that said everytime they tried to play the voicemail.wav (Cisco Unity Voicemail file) file that is attached to an Outlook message they would get the following message:

“Can’t create file: VoiceMessage.wav. Right-click on the folder you want to create the file in, and then click Properties on the shortcut menu to check your permissions for the folder.”

The problem appears to be that Outlook creates a temp folder in your Temporary Internet Files to store the attachments, but doesn’t do a good job of cleaning that folder out when the attachment is closed. So if you open an attachment with the same filename over and over (like voicemail.wav) a temporary file is created in the folder and has a number after it. Everything works fine until you open 100 files with the same name. Then you start to get this error message.

To fix the problem you have to go to Regedit and find the name of the temporary folder and copy and paste the path into Windows Explorer. Then delete the files that are in that folder.

Locate the temporary folder location (Source: http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/securetemp.htm):

Outlook 97 HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice8.0OutlookSecurity
Outlook 98 HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice8.5OutlookSecurity
Outlook 2000 HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice9.0OutlookSecurity
Outlook 2002/XP HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice10.0OutlookSecurity
Outlook 2003 HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice11.0OutlookSecurity
Outlook 2007 HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice12.0OutlookSecurity
Outlook 2010 HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice14.0OutlookSecurity

A little better explination of the problem: http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/2007/08/cant-create-file-outlook-error-and-a-the-fix/


PDF pageEmail pagePrint page