fuslogvw

Sometimes Outlook fails to load BCM right at startup. In those situations the problem maybe that that the BCM or the CLR loaded, or failed to load, the right assembly--because it wasn't found, the wrong version is in the GAC, you tampered with it, whatever.

One way to debug those problems is to run the Assembly Binding Log Viewer. It comes with the .NET Framework SDK, and logs messages from Fusion, the CLR subsystem reponsible for loading assemblies.

You need to run it once to tell it to start logging, and then restart it (dunno why, but that worked for me). From then on it'll log the loading of Application Domains (that's like a .NET process, inside an NT process). After BCM fails to load, click Refresh on the Fusion Log Viewer to see the latest log. There's been a couple of cases where the Fusion log has cleared up a problem that had had me scratching my head (ok, smashing it into the monitor).

[Update: With BCM v3 (Outlook 2007) you need version 2.0 of the .NET SDK.]