The item cannot be displayed in the reading pane. . .

Let me start by saying this is the strangest issue I have ever seen. 

I guessing the reason you are here is because your Outlook won’t display your email messages and you searched for “The item cannot be displayed in the reading pane” and you want to know how to fix it. 

Specs:
IBM Lenovo Laptop
XP Pro
Outlook 2003
Exchange through Cisco VPN 

A new client has just signed a Managed Service contract for their servers, workstations and laptops. We installed our agents on all of their machines on a Friday. We installed our Managed Antivirus and Managed Backup solution (including offsite replication) and rebooted the machines, all but one, the Lenovo Laptop. We scheduled a script to prompt the user to reboot every 5 minutes, unfortunately it took them 3 days to reboot. It was then that the problem started. 

The agent for our Managed Services uses VNC so because of the time and location of the laptop we remoted in.  We could send/receive/reply to email messages however they would not open or display in the reading pane. Email messages would either not display at all or would show “The item cannot be displayed in the reading pane” error. If we double clicked the message to open it, it would be blank or would give an error message.  Our issue wasn’t limited to email or the reading pane. We couldn’t add contacts either. We could edit existing contacts, but not add new. The task list and calendar seemed to be unaffected.  OWA works perfectly fine.  

To fix this issue, we tried EVERYTHING listed below.  

FIX 1 – Clear/Delete the Forms Cache 

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. Click the Other tab, and then click Advanced Options.
3. Click Custom Forms.
4. Click Manage Forms.
5. Click Clear Cache.
6. Close all open windows, and then restart Outlook.

If the above does not work, try the following.

Deleting the Forms Cache File:
The Frmcache.dat file is the primary file to delete. The Frmcache.dat file serves as an index of the individual forms that have been cached on the computer. Use the following steps to manually delete the
Frmcache.dat file. In addition, these steps delete all of the cached forms on your computer, which are stored in subfolders of the Forms folder. 

1. Quit Outlook.
2. Search the Hard drive (<F3>) to locate the Frmcache.dat file.  (Be sure to check in HIDDEN files on W2K or WXP.)
3. Delete all that are found from the FIND window.
4. Open Outlook.

When you restart Outlook, and use a form, the forms cache
is re-created.
 

FIX 2 – Check Add-Ins 

Start Outlook in safe mode to disable add-ins to see if they are causing the issues. 

• Start>Run – Type “outlook.exe /safe” and hit enter. 

FIX 3 – Corrupted Mailbox 

Since this was Exchange, we were dealing with an OST, not a PST, but the fix is the same.  

1. Open Control Panel and double click the Mail icon. 
2. Click Data Files
3. Rename or delete the ost or pst.
4. Start Outlook.  If you are using Exchange the ost will be recreated.  
5. If you are using POP/PST,  Outlook will not be able to find the pst file so you will need to recreate it yourself.

FIX 4 – Rebuild Profile 

An Outlook profile contains specific information about your email account.  Since the profile is a container holding data, it’s always possible that data got corrupted in one way or another.  Profiles aren’t controlled from within Outlook. Instead, they’re set and changed from within the Mail control panel. 

1. Click Start>Settings>Control Panel (or Start>Control Panel)
2. Double-click the Mail control panel icon
3. Click the Show Profiles button. You’ll see a windowlike below.
   
   

The window is straightforward. Before you delete your old profile, I recommend creating a new one by clicking the Add button and then following the wizard.  

FIX 5+ Other Things we tried 

1. Disabling the Antivirus
2. Uninstalling the Antivirus
3. Updating Office
4. Re-installed Office Service Pack 2
5. Setting I.E. as the default browser
6. Uninstalled and re-installed Outlook
7. Updating the Video drivers

Our Last Hurrah 

You may think #6 above is a strange thing to try, however VNC hooks into the video card so we tried one more thing.  

We created and installed a logmein account and logged in with that.  Since Logmein uses the video card/display adapter differently we uninstalled our agent and rebooted the computer and . . . 

SAME PROBLEM!  

Ok, so it was a stretch but we had to try something.  After about 6 hours of remote work we managed to go onsite with the laptop.  

THE FIX (at least it worked for us, for now)

What we didn’t realise until we got onsite is that the laptop was in a docking station connected to a 24 inch monitor.  For some reason, the docking station/video card/display adapter had intermittent issues with the resolution for the large monitor.  

Since we didn’t need Logmein anymore, we uninstalled it and noticed that when our agent was uninstalled, it left VNC behind.  VNC now implements a video hook driver to get the screen refresh changes (as opposed to polling).   The video hook driver makes a direct link between the video driver frammebuffer memory and VNCserver.  Using the framebuffer directly eliminates the use of the CPU for intensive screen blitting, resulting in a big speed boost and very low CPU load.  In effect you can only have one device (software or hardware based) to control the video output. VNC emulates the desktop and if so desired can take control.  Disabling the video hook allows the video card to have exclusive control.  We already had an unstable video card and the VNC video hook driver it pushed it over the edge.   

I still have no idea why this affected Outlook and displaying email messages.  Even stranger, we couldn’t add contacts.  

Once we uninstalled VNC, Outlook worked perfectly fine again.