The text in the message body disappears when you view an HTML message in Outlook 2002

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This article was previously published under Q314893

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SYMPTOMS

If you view and close a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) message in Outlook 2002, you may receive a prompt to save or discard your changes. If you click Yes to save the changes and view the message again, the message is blank. If you view the message in the Preview pane and move the focus to another message, the text in the message body is deleted without warning.

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CAUSE

When Outlook 2002 encounters a message that does not have text in the message body but has a single HTML attachment, it may extract the HTML data from the attachment and display the HTML data as the text in the message body. Even though you did not explicitly tell Outlook 2002 to stream the attachment text into the body of the message, that action is considered a change, and causes you to receive a prompt to save the changes when you close or leave the message.

If you click Yes to the save changes, Outlook 2002 saves the message but does not save the original attachment. Therefore, if you open or view the message again, there is not an attachment and there is not any data to display in the message body.

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RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Office XP. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

307841 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307841/EN-US/ ) OFFXP: How to Obtain the Latest Office XP Service Pack

The English-language version of this fix should have the following file attributes or later:

 
   Version        Size          File name     
   -----------------------------------------
   10.0.3716.0      342,344     Exsec32.dll     
   10.0.3708.0      534,856     OutlCM.dll
   10.0.3716.0    6,306,120     Outllib.dll
   10.0.3618.0       92,488     Outlmime.dll
   10.0.3527.0       47,432     Recall.dll

After the fix is installed, the following files will have the listed attributes or later:

   Version        Size          File name     
   -----------------------------------------
   10.0.3716.0      342,344     Exsec32.dll     
   10.0.3708.0      534,856     OutlCM.dll
   10.0.3716.0    6,306,120     Outllib.dll
   10.0.3618.0       92,488     Outlmime.dll
   10.0.3527.0       47,432     Recall.dll

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WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, click No when you receive the prompt to save changes or to set Rich Text Format (RTF) as your default format.

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STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was first corrected in Microsoft Office XP Service Pack 2 (SP-2).

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