Microsoft Office Outlook has encountered a problem...

[gcotterl]

Almost every time I type a word in the "Instant Search" box then click
on the magnifying glass symbol, a "Microsoft Office Outlook" dialog
box is displayed.

The box says "Microsoft Office Outlook has encountered a problem and


needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience...".

What am I doing wrong?

[bschorr-MVP]

Does this happen even if you start Outlook in Safe Mode? (hold down CTRL while you click the icon) See if this helps: http://www.officeforlawyers.com/outlook/tsol.htm#safe Have you tried rebuilding the search index?

[TecSupGal]

There are a couple of levels at which Instant Search can break. You can troubleshoot Instant Search in following methods:
Marked for indexing
File-> Options-> section Search-> button Indexing Options…-> button Modify-> expand Microsoft Outlook
In the list that is shown under Microsoft Outlook, make sure that your pst-file is displayed and selected. If it is not listed, you’ll have to recreate your mail profile.
Check for pst-file corruptions
If your pst-file has been marked but Outlook doesn’t display the correct results, it usually means there is some corruption going on in your pst-file. In order to fix these you should scan your pst-file for errors with scanpst.exe. You can find this file in the same folder as outlook.exe

For Outlook 2010 you must click in the Search field in order to make the Search Tools tab visible in the Ribbon. Here click the Search Tools button and select the Indexing Status…
Disable and then re-enable the file for indexing
Go back to the Search Options and deselect the data file that is giving you issues. Close Outlook and wait for about 5 minutes and also verify in Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) that on the Processes tab the outlook.exe process actually quits. You might get a lot of disk activity; this is the Search Indexer removing the indexed items from the Index.
After this open Outlook again and go back to the Search Option and select the pst-file we just deselected. Leave the computer idle again and see if it will eventually reach the status of "0 items remaining."
Rebuild the index
If it doesn’t, it might be that the Index itself has been damaged. In order to reset this, go to Control Panel-> Indexing Options-> Advanced-> button Rebuild
This will rebuild the entire Index from scratch and depending on the amount of documents to be indexed, this could take quite long and degrade your system’s performance while the Indexer is still busy. I would recommend to have it rebuild itself overnight.