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Update: If you’re running IE 7 and still having a problem with RSS feeds in Outlook 2007, please try some of the things listed in the comments section and leave some feedback as to how they worked. Thanks. Also, you can submit a comment to Microsoft through this KB article–it’s not the exact problem, but it’s the closest to it that they’ll admit to.

I installed Outlook 2007 along with the rest of Office 2007 yesterday. One of the neat-looking features in there is the ability to add RSS Feeds right into Outlook, which allows you to follow your favorite channels right in the mail client. Sounds good, right?

Well, today I went to sync up my feeds, and I received the following nifty error:

Task 'RSS Feeds' reported error (0xBDD40155) : 'Outlook cannot download the RSS content from http://neverblog.net/feed/ because of a problem connecting to the server. An OLE registration error occurred. The program is not correctly installed. Run Setup again for the program.'

Googling this error resulted in a bunch of useless information, and one particularly useless Microsoft Office Knowledge Base article which indicates that the problem is a ‘known error’ with Outlook 2007. Microsoft claims the error is “a known limitation with a very small set of RSS Feeds when you have Internet Explorer 6 installed on your machine. Upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 to continue syncing these feeds.”

Ok, so that’s a really informative answer. Microsoft understands there’s a problem, but they don’t seem to care that much, except to take it as a wonderful opportunity to force more people to upgrade to their terrible new browser (it’s got TABS!!! Yay!!!). I just finished installing IE7, and now I’m getting the following message when I re-open Outlook 2007.

It still doesn’t work with the RSS feeds, though. Windows is telling me I need to reboot, so I’m going to try that. This seems like a DLL registration error or the like, and it’s not the first time Microsoft has had problems integrating things into Outlook. After the reboot, the RSS feeds do work, but at what cost!!!

So I guess the moral of the story is, if you get the OLE error, bite the bullet and install IE7. Or, if you don’t need the RSS functionality, you can just remove that folder.

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