Outlook 2007 - Right Click and Send to Mail Recipient Problem - FIXED

My company recently upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007, most users are still on Windows XP. It is taking some time for users to figure out the features in this version given the lack of traditional menus. I personally like the tab/icon set up, but it IS different and folks take "different" badly sometimes.

One user had a particularly interesting issue, unrelated to the interface. She normally would send attachments from Windows Explorer by right-clicking and selecting "Send To" and "Mail Recipient". She'd then use Outlook to find the email address or other information.

When she did this now, she would be able to send the email but Outlook 2007 would be frozen, locked up and inacessible until she closed that email. (Some extra keywords there for search engines. :-) ) Once she closed the email, Outlook would continue normally.

Searching for the answer brought a typically bad response from one of those Microsoft MVP types basically saying "get over it". Altering the search parameters some I came upon a helpful, but not perfect Microsoft page and an Outlook Tips page. But these didn't fix the problem, but using those pages and the command line reference for Outlook 2007, this gave me the answer:

1. Open My Computer or Windows Explorer and navigate to your c:\Documents and Settings\{user name}\Send To directory.
2. Delete the existing Mail Recipient shortcut.
3. Right-click and select New and Shortcut.
4. In the command line box (or Location box) put in the following (Make sure you use the quotes.): "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /p
5. Click "Ok" and name your new shortcut to "Mail Recipient".

Your new Send To context menu should now send HTML (or RTF) emails and allow you to continue to use Outlook simultaneously.